


The Underside of the Dice

by Little_Lottie (tfwatson)



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: (this is trope typical but I wanted to warn - explanation in the notes of the relevant chapter), AU!mistaken identity dub con, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Parallel Universes, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-15 23:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10559578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfwatson/pseuds/Little_Lottie
Summary: Easy Company was at its breaking point, on a tipping scale between life before and life after the war. Dick, it would seem, was no different. When he reneges on an order for a second prisoner snatch, fate decides that one good deed deserves another, and on the night that Nix writes his bogus report into the early hours, Dick wakes to find himself in another place, in another time, and in a reality in which he’s dating Lewis Nixon III.





	1. Tipping

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to my artist @suitcasefullofmixtapes, who is just lovely and who has made the perfect art to go with this fic - thank you! Another massive thank you to the wonderful @dancinguniverse for being such an amazing beta reader and supporter. Finally, thank you so much to the mods for organising all of this, to anyone who has had to put up with me talking about this non stop for months, and to you for reading!
> 
> One last note, a fandom friend recommended the song Fools by Lauren Aquilina to me recently and this is such a beautiful song and also fits this fic perfectly (should you want to check it out :) )

Find the art for this fic [here!](https://suitcasefullofmixtapes.tumblr.com/post/159336046707/its-posting-day-heres-my-art-for)

~

_“Sometimes, before I fall asleep or when I catch a piece of music that lifts my soul, I envision another way to live. That’s when I suspect I’ve gotten it wrong and I’ve wasted my time, tilting at windmills — not anticipating the unexpected or being present enough to recognize it.”_

— Katherine Reay, A Portrait of Emily Price

 

~  
 

 ** _Haguenau, France_** — ** _February 1945_**

 

 _“‘I want you all to get a full night’s sleep tonight,’_ ” Nix says into the cozy hush of Dick’s make-shift office.

 

There’s a smile in his voice as he playfully tests the feel of Dick’s words on his tongue, a delayed echo of earlier, and Dick finds himself mirroring the smile into his paperwork.

 

 _“‘In the morning, you will report to me that you made it across the river… into German lines… but were unable to secure any live prisoners.’_ ”

 

Dick suppresses his smile long enough to feign an unimpressed look. “I thought the whole point of you writing that report was to bury my words under some fancy Yale ones, Nix.”

 

The responding chuckle is a bright sound that bounces around the room and soothes over Dick’s skin.

 

“Is that what I said? I meant fancy Yale lies,” Nix replies with a teasing grin. “Either way, you’re safe because this is worthy of a Nobel prize. I knew I was going to enjoy the hell out of writing this.”

 

Nix salutes with his pencil and Dick shakes his head indulgently. He feels a smile creep up on him again, because he can always smile for Nix. It's instinctive, like a reflex; even in the wake of the most furious he’s ever been.

 

Earlier that afternoon, he'd been ordered to send men to their deaths for Sink’s pride, and he can still feel the fire of anger simmering down his spine. They’re close, so close to surviving this war. He can feel it in his gut. They just have to tread carefully and do what needs to be done. But the patrol Sink had ordered was neither well-judged nor necessary.

 

Dick isn’t proud of himself. Stopping the patrol had potentially saved lives, but he’d just been following his conscience.

 

Nix, on the other hand, is genuinely buoyed up, high on the back of a rebellious decision in the name of what’s right. Dick can just imagine him, a dark haired snip of a boy in a grand Nixon library or curled up in the armchair of his father’s study, reading about the French Revolution with his fists held high.

 

It still astonishes Dick that he’s the one who gets to see him like this, that he’ll actively seek out Dick’s company when he’s at his most magnetic. Dick knows he’s lucky enough to get the very best of him, and for that, he’ll take the worst of him too.

 

When his mind is drawn back to the present, Nix is peering at him over pencil and paper. For a brief moment he looks caught out — little Lew with a copy of _European Revolutions in 1848_ hidden under his coat when his mother wants him reading something more palatable (less controversial). Then the wide-eyed look disappears behind the brightness of one of his grins.

 

He almost looks drunk — the kind of drunk you get when you don’t consume alcohol like Lewis Nixon and you gulp down two flutes of champagne in quick succession —  but Dick hasn’t seen him with a single whiskey-colored tumbler tonight. It’s the flush on his cheeks and spark in his eyes that make him seem giddy, and it reminds Dick of the dazzling smile he’d worn when Sink had announced Easy as bona fide paratroopers.

 

That day seems so long ago and Dick can’t help wondering what fate awaits them all. They’re another patrol down but if they survive whatever else the war throws at them, what happens then? With the feeling that they’re inching closer and closer to the end, the fluttering of a newfound hope in their stomachs, comes the shadow of uncertainty. How well will he, or any of his men, adjust to life after war?

 

And there are things he’ll miss too. When the war’s over, Dick’s best friend will return to New Jersey, to his wife and child, and the thought claws at Dick’s chest. He could swear that the very air feels pulled taut around him.

 

Shooting a quick, covert look over his shoulder, Dick studies Nix as he writes. His face is lined with concentration but his lips are pursed as though they could spread into a grin at any moment. He wasn’t kidding: he really is enjoying that report.

 

Dick’s too busy thinking about how the light is framing Nix’s jaw to notice when brown eyes flick up and meet his across the room. He startles, feeling strangely contrite to have been caught staring, but if Nix has noticed he doesn’t say anything.

 

“Alright, Captain Winters,” he announces with a dramatic flourish as he uncurls himself from the chair. “I need to go and write up my novella.” He pats Dick on the shoulder as he walks past, leaves heat and comfort in his wake.

 

When Nix reaches the door, he looks back and there’s a sudden intensity in his eyes. His mouth is parted ever so slightly like he’s waiting to breathe hesitant words off of his tongue and Dick feels a shiver on his skin as though the room is drawing in a breath. The moment stretches out as Dick waits, smile slowly fading because Nix still hasn’t said anything and it's starting to look like the unspoken words are somehow hurting him.

 

Another long second passes before Nix pushes a hand through his hair and goes to speak. “You know, I—” he cuts himself off, studies the floor and takes a breath. “I’m really proud of you, Dick.”

 

Dick blinks and smiles, feeling somehow lighter than he has in weeks, maybe months. He can’t think of what to say, so for a few seconds they just watch one another. It’s not unusual, this weighted silence in which eyes track faces, read emotions, communicate without words. In fact, it's so far from remarkable that it feels somehow telling. Dick doesn’t know what that means, but it sends a dart of warmth through his body and a flush onto his cheeks.

 

With a tiny nod, Nix’s spine straightens and he raps his knuckles on the door frame, the sound of a decision made. A second later, he turns and walks away, leaving Dick with a sense that something remains unsaid, an odd feeling of anticlimax. Part of him wonders if Nix will be back.

 

Eventually he winds back around to his desk, but he doesn’t turn the light out straight away. He sits in the gentle glow and lets Nix’s softly spoken parting words hum around his head a while. He wouldn’t have reneged on the patrol order if he didn’t think it was right, but Nix has always been his sounding board and his approval helps the choice sit happily alongside his conscience.

 

Outside the window, the moon is shrouded, wrapped in a cover of cloud that they could really have done with on another night, another patrol. Haguenau is still, tense, waiting for a prisoner snatch that won’t happen.

 

He’s not sure how long he sits there, thinking hard and flipping his pencil against the typewriter absent-mindedly, but it's long enough that he’s startled when there’s movement behind him.

 

“You can’t have finished that report already,” he says as he turns in his chair. The room is silent a beat too long to be normal. He frowns, squinting against the dark. “Nix?”

 

The responding knock is clumsy and rushed and he immediately knows it isn’t Nix. He can’t quite pinpoint why, but when the figure steps forward, features smudged by shadows, his skin prickles with unease.

 

“Sorry to trouble you, sir.”

 

“Who—?” The rest of the question freezes in Dick’s throat as the inky silhouette slowly steps into the lamp light.

 

He feels like ice water is sluicing through his veins, stomach twisting cruelly in shock as he takes in the soldier in front of him. It can’t possibly be, but standing just two steps away and grinning is Corporal Donald Hoobler. And it doesn't seem to matter how hard he blinks or how sharply he bites down on the inside of his cheek, the ghost of Hoobler doesn’t go away. It just smiles brighter.

 

Dick gapes, hand tightening on the back of the chair until it feels like the wood’s flexing in his grip. “Hoob?” he finally chokes out in disbelief.

 

“Yes, Captain Winters, sir,” Hoobler replies, cheerful and seemingly oblivious to Dick’s horror as he sits in the same chair Nix had been sprawled in not long before. The boy — if the shadow really is a boy at all — cusses suddenly then rushes to backtrack. “Permission to sit, sir?”

 

If Dick weren’t looking at a man long dead, and if his heart weren’t pounding against his chest so hard he feels like he can’t breathe, he might even laugh. “Granted,” he mutters automatically instead, paralyzed by shock as he watches the apparition settle back into the chair with a boyish grin.

 

It’s fractionally easier to breathe when he reasons with himself that he must be dreaming, but his chest still twists to see Hoobler sat there when he’s not really there at all. When the evidence of his stolen life is plain for all to see, a tiny hole and a sprawling blood stain saturating almost the whole of his right pant leg. Dick shakes his head and tries to shake the dream out with it.

 

“I don’t see as you’d dream of me, sir,” Hoobler chips in brightly, still very much right in front of him.

 

Dick looks at him sharply. “I didn’t say…” He trails off, unable to find the words to ask Hoobler how he can somehow listen to unspoken thoughts. _Because it's a dream_ , Dick’s rational voice insists.

 

Acting on instinct, he reaches out and hopes his hand will touch nothing but thin air, a way of proving to himself that he’s hallucinating. Instead his hand connects with olive drabs and the solidity of a body. He snaps his hand back and staggers out of the chair.

 

In the seconds and sharp breaths that follow, Dick feels his pulse rocket. As impossible as it is, a boy that looks and sounds exactly like Donald Hoobler — who _is_ Donald Hoobler — is right in front of him, and it feels real even if it isn’t.

 

“Hoobler,” Dick attempts, voice strained. “How are you here?”

 

“I’d try and explain, but I ain't got much time and I’m not allowed to say much.” He looks around quickly then down at his hands where his fingers seem to be disappearing at the edges in little wisps of skin-colored smoke. Dick inhales sharply.

 

“That was a fine thing you did today, sir,” the trooper continues, tone determined. “A real good thing.” His smile and the way he fidgets is reminiscent of Nix’s earlier enthusiasm. “Someone noticed.”

 

Dick jolts with a more familiar panic. “Sink knows?”

 

“No, sir,” Hoob splutters through surprised laughter, “someone much more important.” Dick frowns in confusion. “But it’s good! They want to help you. They know you’re not happy.”

 

“We’re in the middle of a war, Hoob. No one’s happy.”

 

“Not like that, sir. You’re missing something, and they want you to find it. To see what things could be like if you’d done something differently.” Hoobler leans forward in excitement. “You did a good deed. So good, they want to give something back.”

 

“I’m blessed enough,” Dick says, not quite believing he’s having this conversation. “I’m not looking for anything more.”

 

“Okay, maybe not _more_ , but… someone sure thinks that things could be different for you,” Hoob insists. The lines of his silhouette are hazy now, glowing brighter but somehow fading too. “I ain’t got long. You need to know that there are some rules for this.”

 

“Rules for what?”

 

“You’ll know, sir. When it happens, you’ll know. But someone will tell you the rules when there’s more time.”

 

Dick swallows back a groan of frustration. He can't help but think that Hoobler is perhaps the most unlikely cryptic his brain could have dreamed up.

 

“They said the most important thing for you to know is this: glimpse.”

 

“Glimpse?” Dick’s voice is hardening, tired even in apparent dream-sleep, angry with his subconscious for tormenting him with a fallen Toccoa man and riddles of second chances and roads untrodden when there’s enough heartache and loss already.

 

“That’s what they said, sir.”

 

“And they sent you to tell me?”

 

“I guess maybe they thought I wouldn’t scare you, huh, sir?”

 

Dick winces. As cheerful as ghost-Hoobler appears to be, it would probably be tactless to remind him that he’s dead. Dead and walking and speaking; there’s not much that could scare Dick more.

 

“Yeah,” Hoobler says on a tiny sigh, like he’s reading Dick’s mind again. “Dying hurt like a son of a bitch, but it’s okay… being dead’s a doozy.”

 

There’s a squirming feeling in Dick’s stomach, but Hoob’s throwing him a toothy grin that somehow manages to be reassuring.

 

“It’s alright, sir, but I have to go now.”

 

As abruptly as that, the muted gray shapes of Hoobler fan out into a cloud of dusty white rain that mists through the room like waterfall spray.

 

When the shimmer melts into the air, Dick’s head starts to spin. It feels like sleep dragging him down, like a hook in the base of his spine tugging him away from consciousness.

 

As his eyes slide shut, Dick thinks of lines and rivers that can be crossed. And others that should never be.


	2. Dividend

When Dick wakes, he’s warm and it’s quiet. He’s vaguely aware that he’s not hunched over a typewriter, which in itself rings alarm bells. But it’s a far-off warning, and every time he tries to focus on the thought, it seems to slip further away.

 

Frowning, he attempts to think through the pounding in his head. The Easy boys will be coming to find him soon to report an unsuccessful prisoner snatch that was, in truth, unattempted. He hardly has time to feel relief before unease creeps in. He should be hearing the noise of an entire battalion readying to move off the line. Instead, there’s an increasingly frantic _beep, beep._

 

A small piece of his mind is waving a red flag, but the sense of foreboding is softened by the fog in his brain and the pillow under his head which is like powdered cloud against his skin. It feels so good to press his face into the downy softness and drive the niggling thought away.

 

“You lucky bastard.”

 

Dick jumps, then immediately freezes. That’s undoubtedly Nix’s voice, sleep heavy and rough, but at the same time… it’s not, because Dick’s never heard this low, early morning purr of a voice. And even if he had, he’s never been close enough to feel the way it sends intimate little puffs of air against the back of his bare shoulder.

 

He keeps his eyes closed, screws them shut and tries to push out the dream. Two dreams in one night and he probably needs to be more careful to check for contamination before he downs his rations.

 

“Teachers and their holidays,” the voice ghosts into his ear again. The words don’t make any sense, but neither does the bed, or the pillow, or Nix’s lazy sex-soaked tone.

 

Heart thundering in his throat, Dick shifts slightly when a tickle of breath sends goose bumps over his skin and that's when he realizes that there’s a warm body — _Nix’s_ body — pressed flush against his back from shoulder to ankle.

 

A choked-off noise slips from Dick’s lips and his fists clench hard in the unreasonably soft bed-sheets. He tries to think fast, but his skull’s throbbing and it seems impossible to look for rational explanations when Nix is inconceivably skin-to-skin and making Dick’s brain stutter.

 

There’s a warm arm draped around his waist which tightens when instinct tells him to jerk away. He knows he could throw Nix off, he’s won enough wrestling matches against him, but his muscles are frozen. And besides, this is Lew.

 

“Nix! What are you doing?!”

 

“Yeah, I know. I should be leaving,” Nix responds, unaware or just unperturbed by the sharpness in Dick’s voice. “I’m up, I’m up.” The grumbling tone is familiar, but Dick can feel the rumble of the words where the two of them are pressed chest to back and it’s new and terrifying.

 

“No, but…”

 

The sentence goes unfinished when a hot, silky, feather-like touch lands at the top of his spine. A split second later, he realizes that Nix’s lips are brushing across his shoulder blade and the shock of it has him bolting upright with a barely contained yelp and roughly pulling out of Nix’s grip.

 

If he thought he’d have a second to get his head together, he was entirely wrong. Behind him, Nix is muttering something about being manhandled in an improbably flirtatious voice, but Dick’s too busy staring around the room in acute panic for it to faze him.

 

He swallows, continues to stare, because while he’d fallen asleep at a desk in a bombed out house in Haguenau, he’s woken up somewhere else entirely.

 

Wide-eyed, he takes in the smaller, brighter, unfamiliar room, with its unpatterned walls of unforgiving white. A flat, black, shiny box takes up most of the space, alongside shelves of books, a drawer unit in warm wood, and a wardrobe from which Nix seems to be begrudgingly taking clothes. Nix, who is _naked_.

 

Dick’s stomach swoops oddly and he feels his face instantly heat as he snaps his eyes away from the curves of Nix’s back. He’s seen Nix naked, it's nothing shocking, but he’s never seen him naked straight after he’s been pressed right up against his own, equally bare skin.

 

“The least you could do is pretend you’re going back to sleep so I can live vicariously through you,” Nix is saying as he moves around the room. He grabs a silver object and points it at the black screen on the wall, which instantly floods with color. “Do me a favor and pretend you won’t be out of bed and going for a run the minute I walk out the door.”

 

Dick doesn’t respond. He doesn’t hear the fond jibe or see the way Nix’s lips curl in a smile when he looks over his shoulder. All his attention is fixed on the screen. He’s heard of televisions, knows they’re something rich people own. He also knows with certainty that they don’t look like this.

 

Dick breathes in, a long pull of air right into his lungs. “Nix,” he says slowly. “I don’t understand.”

 

Nix throws him a disbelieving look over his shoulder. “Nice try — you understand completely. I’m going to shower. Stay in bed and be normal.”

 

Dick screws his eyes shut, tries to rub the imaginary insanity out of his eyes, but he just can’t reason this. There’s no plausible explanation, only the memory of a misty white curtain and the vision of a dead paratrooper.

 

Something is definitely, very wrong.

 

Nix grabs the fluffiest towel Dick has ever seen and walks out of the room, leaving him lost and sitting with his mouth hanging open in a bundle of bed-sheets that aren’t his own.

 

As soon as he hears the click of what he presumes is the bathroom door, he’s up and out of bed. Not to run, as Nix predicted, but with the adrenalin-induced desire to scour every inch of the room for an explanation.

 

As frantic as he feels, he makes his hands scramble across the top of the nightstand as quietly as he can, picking up and putting down foreign-looking books, pens, a little glass oblong that lights up when he touches it. He pushes them all aside and searches further into the drawer, finding notebooks scrawled on in his own handwriting, a pouch with a tie pin, and a small wooden box with two matching gold bands nestled inside.

 

He snaps the lid down quickly when he spots a neat pile of mail emblazoned with the words _Richard Winters_. Dick can feel his muscles loosen, chest relaxing as he sees his own name. Thank God, because that’s something at least. He’s still _him_.

 

Sadly, the comfort lasts only the small handful of seconds it takes for him to check — and re-check — the postmark on the top right of the first envelope, where the date _Oct 12 2016_ is stamped in stark black ink. Convinced it must be a glitch, he hurriedly flicks through the stack, but every piece of mail, every stamp, tries to tell him that the letters were posted in either the year 2015 or 2016.

 

His head swims. He feels like the floor could be vibrating under him, but it's just his hands shaking.

 

Almost unwillingly, his eyes flick down to the address… to the word _Chicago._ His hands tighten, paper crinkling under the pressure of his anxiety. He’s never been to Chicago, let alone lived there, and instead of disputing the discrepancy, the postmark just verifies it.

 

Steeling himself, he turns to look over his shoulder at the television where it flickers brightly and murmurs quietly into the room. He’d been too floored to notice when the screen first burst to life, but it's tuned to a Chicago news station.

 

He blinks slowly before lurching back into the bed just as Nix emerges from the bathroom, washed up and shaved with a towel hanging low on his hips. This man certainly looks like Nix: same age, same height, same build, but there’s something different. He seems content somehow. And arguably a good deal peppier in the morning than his Nix.

 

His Nix, Dick thinks with an incredulous shake of the head. Where _is_ his Nix? Where’s the war, and where’s his battalion? And if Dick is here, then who will Nix be looking for in Haguenau? If there’s still a Haguenau at all.

 

He scrubs a frustrated hand over his face. The _where_ might not actually be the biggest of his problems, because there’s also the question of _when_. The room around him is from a different time, not the one he fell asleep in last night and not any he’s ever seen in history books. And it’s all starting to add up to a stack of letters and _Oct 12 2016._

 

When Dick pries his eyes open, desperately clinging to the hope that this will all have gone away, Nix is dressed in a dark blue suit that’s styled in a cut Dick has never seen.

 

“You were supposed to go back to sleep,” Nix observes in mock reprimand. “Ten points from Gryffindor.”

 

“What?”

 

“Ravenclaw, whatever.”

 

“Seriously, Lew,” he presses. “What’s going on?”

 

Nix gives him an odd look. “I’m going to work. Are you alright?” On his way to the door, his lips curl into a slow grin. “Did you sneak some of my whiskey last night, bud?”

 

Dick’s in the middle of nervously pulling the sheets around himself when Nix dips back in through the doorway, leans over the bed, and plants a kiss on the corner of Dick’s mouth.

 

Dick gasps. Nix has never kissed him goodbye. A pat on the back, a touch on the arm, yes, and sure sometimes he’d gaze so long that Dick thought the other boys would notice, but that was just Nix’s way. None of Dick’s friends have ever kissed him. Friends — even best friends — just don’t do that.

 

They certainly don’t let their lips linger, hum contentedly into the kiss and say, “I might be late home from the office so don't worry about cooking for me,” on their retreat. Or so Dick thought.

 

His mouth still tingles as he gapes up at Nix, receiving a raised eyebrow and a fondly amused smile in return. “So… see you tonight?”

 

“Yeah, sure thing,” Dick hears himself say in a tight voice. Then because Nix is still looking at him expectantly, he clumsily adds, “Can’t wait,” and holds his breath to see if it’s the right thing to say.

 

Nix’s face breaks into a stunning smile. He looks so happy that Dick tamps down the urge to cry out in panic, to grab his friend’s shoulders and demand to know where Belgium has disappeared to and what the hell’s happened to 1945. Because _this_ is undoubtedly neither.

 

Nix is halfway out the front door when Dick’s handle on his control snaps. “Nix!”

 

Before the door slams he hears Nix call out, “I’m _late_ , Dick. Oh and for God’s sake, don’t forget to feed Trigger.”

 

~

 

Dick sits on the bed, trying to muddle through the frantic mess of his own thoughts.

 

Thoughts like how the bed he’s sitting on is supposedly his bed, but is also a bed he shares with Lewis Nixon, and how he’s suddenly in a different life, which he also appears to share with Lewis Nixon; and the only explanation Dick can come up with leads directly back to a dead soldier and a riddle.

 

The strands of memories wind themselves into knots to the point where he finds plausible explanations that just as quickly circle back around to being impossible again.

 

—  _“Someone noticed...You’re missing something, and they want you to find it.”_

 

The words rattle around in his mind as he leans back to stare at the perfectly flat, pristine-white ceiling, but replaying Hoobler’s ghostly visit on repeat doesn't make the words any clearer or his appearance any less impossible.

 

Dick’s half sitting on an open newspaper that he’d found under a used coffee cup on Nix’s side of the bed. He’s probably going to come away with an ink brand on the back of his thigh, but he’s got other things to worry about. Other things that spin his mind and force white noise in the place where rational thought should be, because like a deadly co-conspirator, the date on the paper corroborates the postmarks on the envelopes he’d found.

 

 _2016_. Four numbers that tell him he’s either going crazy or he’s woken up seventy years in the future. He feels like he's losing his damn mind.

 

Ignoring the tightening in his ribs, Dick looks away from the stark ceiling and re-scans the room until a picture catches his attention and draws him in. He walks towards it, breath hitching as the image becomes bigger, clearer. From the outside looking in, it's just a vibrantly colored photograph of him and Nix, but Dick’s never posed for this picture.

 

The Dick and Nix in the frame are a couple of years younger, with laughter in their eyes and a happy flush on their cheeks. They’re squeezed as close together as two people can be, looking down the lens in joy as Nix presses his lips to Dick’s cheek.

 

Dick draws in a sharp breath. He’s not sure he's ever seen himself smile so widely, and he certainly would have remembered if Nix had kissed him.

 

But Nix _had_ kissed him, and not just some hypothetical Dick in an unknown photograph, but _him_ , in this very room. It had been as soft and sure as if he’d done it a hundred times, and Dick doesn’t know what to make of it, or feel about it, but he knows he should probably be feeling more of _something,_ not this numb confusion that’s making his brain feel like it might short circuit.

 

He sighs, turning his head to the window and gazing through the grimy glass at a wintery cityscape he doesn’t recognize. Staring at the towering buildings, he sees the address on a dozen envelopes, a news station and the name of a day-old newspaper, and his stomach knots on a memory.

 

 — _“We’ll go to Chicago. I’ll take you there.”_  

— _“Yeah, we’ll see.”_

 

We’ll see, indeed. The wall is solid under his fingers, the glass icy cold. It’s real, there’s no doubt about it.

 

Long minutes later, Dick comes to a decision. He can’t make sense of Chicago or 2016 or the kiss, so he focuses on something he can. Nix — well, not really Nix, ‘Not-Nix’ maybe — has asked him to do something and maybe that’s the best place to start. But before he leaves the room, he needs to find something to wear. Maybe being covered will ease some of this uncomfortable, vulnerable feeling that’s been simmering under his skin.

 

Clothes aren’t difficult to find. There’s one double wardrobe and about a third of the clothes inside appear to be his size even if he doesn’t recognize any of them. While it’s disturbing to think that he apparently owns clothes he’s never set eyes on, he’s relieved to see his likeness in the full length mirror. He still looks the same — identical hair and eye color, the predictable scattering of freckles — and that’s something at least. His reflection’s right, it’s just everything else that isn’t.

 

Setting his jaw in determination, he opts for a plain shirt and pants, simply because they remind him of his ODs.

 

He tries to focus on Nix’s parting instruction, all the while thinking that it would be much easier to feed Trigger if he had some idea of where and what Trigger actually is. As much as he'd like it to be an easy-to-please houseplant, his mind shifts to Tab and his dog and it occurs to him that Trigger is probably some kind of pet.

 

This quiet confidence is a comforting novelty in a place and time he feels completely lost in. It bolsters him enough that he’s happy to test his theory. So much so that he calls out, “Trigger!” and doesn't even feel disheartened when he's met with silence instead of a thundering of paws or an excited mewl. Just because it's not easy doesn't mean he's wrong.

 

Dick steps out of the room and into a larger living area. He has to force himself to stop mentally listing all of the things that don’t belong in 1945, but when he finds a dark brown Labrador curled up on a rug in an adjoined kitchen, he allows himself a sigh of relief.

 

As soon as it sees him, the dog bounces up with an enthusiastic bark, claws scrabbling on the hardwood floor. It skips to a plastic bowl which it nudges demandingly. The soft-eyed, energetic animal is remarkably comforting and for the first time since waking up, Dick feels some of the tension drain away as he strokes it. That is until he finds a collar and a name tag etched in unmistakable letters.

 

“Billy?”

 

The Labrador barks in excitement and Dick frowns. So much for that idea. A split second later, he hears a shriek.

 

Heart racing, he follows the sound to a second bedroom, where a little boy in a cot holds its chubby arms up high, beams a gummy smile at him and gasps a series of excitable breaths. _In-out, in-out, squeal_.

 

Dick stares. There’s a baby that seems to live with him — with him and Nix — cooing at him, and it’s gnawing its little fingers like it might be hungry. Dick feels like the bottom’s dropped out of the room.

 

Oh God, Trigger’s definitely not a dog.

 

He has absolutely no idea what to do with a baby. He wants to go over and pick it up, see if it’s as cuddly as it looks and find it some food so it doesn’t end up chewing its whole fist, but he’s scared he’ll hurt it. So he just stares like it’s a threat to be mitigated while it gurgles and claps its hands with another high pitched squeal.

 

Dick bolts for the front door when he hears a knock, and throws it open to reveal a bright and breezy Harry on the other side.

 

“Nix and I have a baby,” Dick blurts.

 

“I should hope so,” Harry grins. “Kitty will kill me if you’ve lost our kid.”

 

“What?”

 

“Shit, did he sleep that badly? You look like death.” Harry brushes past him into the apartment, patting him on the arm as he goes. “I slept eight hours straight and I don’t feel an ounce of guilt.”

 

“Trigger’s your baby,” Dick breathes in relief.

 

Harry snorts. “No need to be like that. It’s not like we don’t pay you to look after him. Oh that’s right, we don’t.”

 

Dick’s distracted from Harry’s cheeky grin when he gets a face full of tumbling mousy-brown hair. The woman who’s hugging him steps back to smile at him with sparkling blue eyes before cooling her expression into one of mock reprimand.

 

“So your lesser half has finally got you calling my son that horrible nickname,” she scolds, holding her composure for only a split second before a grin slides onto her face.

 

Dick stares at her. “Umm… yes,” he murmurs, trying to cover the fact that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about and has no idea what her name is.

 

The woman doesn't seem unduly suspicious. She’s still smiling when she asks, “Are you still okay to have Elsie?”

 

“Elsie?” he repeats blankly before he can stop himself.

 

Harry throws him a confused look. “Dick are you alright? You really don’t look so good.”

 

“Yeah, I—I don’t feel that great. I don’t remember…” He bites his lip to keep from saying too much.

 

“You don’t remember what? Did you hit your head or something?”

 

“No, I don’t think… umm... yeah, I guess. Maybe.”

 

Harry looks around, concerned. “Kitty, you think we should take him to the hospital?”

 

“No! I’m fine,” Dick says quickly. Fortunately at that moment he spots a little girl standing behind her mother’s skirts. Given his recent experience, he's reluctant to rely on his guesswork, but if this isn't ‘Elsie’ then he really has no clue. “There she is. Of course I can look after her. It’s not a problem.”

 

“Harry’s right, Dick,” Kitty starts. “You don’t look so good. Are you sure you’re okay?” She looks concerned. Concerned for him, but probably more so for her daughter, who up until a minute ago she was planning on leaving with him. “Maybe someone else can look after her and you can go back to bed.”

 

Harry screws his face up. “Dick is the only reliable person we know.”

 

Kitty pauses. “I don't think day care will take both the kids at short notice, but I could call in sick.”

 

“No, really,” Dick insists, desperate for everything to look normal. “It’s fine.”

 

Dick can't remember the last time he felt fussed over like this. Even Roe hadn't looked this concerned when he was fishing bits of bullet from out of Dick’s ankle.

 

They circle around for a while, but after Dick promises he’ll call if he feels unwell, Kitty reluctantly takes Trigger to the day care and Harry leaves for work.

 

In the ensuing hush, Dick turns to the little girl at a bit of a loss. She has a model tank in one hand and a Barbie in the other. They watch each other in a sort of smiling stand-off until Dick breaks the silence. “Hi. Can I look at your toy?”

 

“Be careful,” Elsie warns as she hands it over with a very serious expression on her face. “Tanks are dangerous. They have guns, you know.”

 

Dick huffs a little laugh, for the irony and for the little girl who seems so grown up all of a sudden. “Hmm.”

 

“What should we do today?” she asks, springing into one of the chairs, hair bouncing in loose curls around her face.

 

He looks around the apartment and comes up with nothing, but Elsie doesn't give him a chance to answer anyway.

 

“You’re not Uncle Rich are you?” she asks, tilting her head thoughtfully.

 

He startles, but clears his throat, wonders if she’s either incredibly clever or it’s just coincidence that she’s right. “Rich?”

 

“I’m not allowed to use the other name.”

 

“Why?”

 

She shrugs and barrels straight into her next thought. “But I _know_ you’re not Uncle Rich.”

 

“How?”

 

She turns to him with a kind smile. “You don’t like that color green. You only have that shirt because Uncle Lew’s mommy bought it for you. And you always call Daddy ‘Welsh’.”

 

Dick’s mind races to catch up, but when it does, he smiles back. It feels good to have an ally. “You're observant,” he comments.

 

“Well, I also saw a soldier from heaven at breakfast this morning,” she shrugs. “He said you're new here and might need my help.”

 

Dick almost chuckles.

 

“Do you want to talk about it? I won’t tell Uncle Lew. The soldier told me not to.”

 

“Can I tell you a secret?”

 

She leans forward with theatrical anticipation. “Yesss.”

 

“I’m not meant to be here. Yesterday I was in the army, fighting a war and laughing with my best friend. I woke up this morning and I don’t know who I am or anything about this world.”

 

She regards him seriously. “Do you drive a tank?”

 

“No,” Dick smiles gently. “What do I do here?”

 

“You work at a school.”

 

“Your school?”

 

“No, a school for big people. University.  And Uncle Lew is a lawyer. He’s super smart. Daddy said that the government wanted him. Uncle Lew’s daddy wanted him to work with him too, but Uncle Lew said there was no way in any of the nine circles of hell that he was gonna work for that….” she trails off, then adds, “and then Daddy covered my ears.”

 

Dick coughs to hide his smile. He surveys the room, takes in warm walnut and sleek metal. Buttons, dials and digital numbers. “Do you know what any of this stuff actually does?”

 

So Elsie shows him around the apartment and explains some of the technology he doesn’t know about, including his phone — which is just as well because there’s already a message waiting for him from Nix, and another two from Kitty. Dick watches carefully as Elsie replies and gets that wave of anxiety clutch at his throat again.

 

The tutorial draws to a close and they look at each other quietly.

 

“Card game?” Dick suggests, half expecting her to scoff at him.

 

Instead, she smiles softly, nods and tells him everything will be okay.

 

She sounds so assured that Dick almost believes her.


	3. Glass and mirrors

By the time Nix gets home later that evening, Dick’s helped Elsie set up her plastic soldiers in a full assault and is in the middle of discussing the merits of enlisting the tactical help of Barbie when Nix softly brushes a kiss to his temple.

 

Dick jumps away from the touch before he can stop himself. He doesn’t mean to do it. He knows it's not the right reaction, but as Nix watches on in surprise, he’s already startling to his feet and backing up a couple of steps, heart beating so loudly he thinks Nix might be able to hear it.

 

Dick can only watch as the hurt creeps onto Nix’s face.

 

“I… I need to go out for some fresh air,” he lies, looking down at Elsie who’s watching quietly, and then back at Nix who’s staring at him with painful questions in his eyes.

 

“Okay, no problem,” Nix says stiffly. His face shutters into a cool mask of feigned indifference that makes Dick feel even worse. “Did you eat?” he asks as he turns his back. “What do you say to Thai?”

 

“Thai? I have no idea… ” Nix narrows his eyes and Dick stops himself quickly, heart rate spiking.

 

Since the moment he woke up, Nix has been acting as though everything is perfectly normal, and the fact that Harry didn’t recognize him from anywhere but here, and that Kitty knew him at all, proves that the only person who thinks something is wrong, is him.

 

He doesn’t want Nix to think he’s going crazy, not least because he suspects that maybe he actually is.

 

Dark eyes study him carefully. “Are you okay?”

 

“Yes, I—I think maybe I knocked my head on something?”

 

“Or several somethings,” Nix assesses, but the mask is making way for a frown of concern. “I’ll order take out.”

 

Dick doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, but he nods as he rushes out the door. He does run then. He runs and runs. He tells himself he’s not running away, but back to himself.

 

He doesn’t find what he’s looking for. He finds tall, shining towers and bright lights, sights of a new time that he can’t rub from his eyes or scrub from his mind even though he tries.

 

And then he finds himself lost, staring into a cold river that shimmers with lights, and haunted once again by the ghost of Donald Hoobler. Even in memory, Hoob’s words are as clear and cryptic as the first time he’d heard them.

 

— _“Someone noticed... You’re missing something, and they want you to find it. To see what things could be like, if you’d done something differently.”_

 

If Dick suspends all disbelief and accepts that the ghostly visit was real, Hoobler would have him believing that there’s something about this world, this life, that he’s meant to be missing. The trouble is, he can't think about what he’s missing when he feels like he’s just lost everything he already had.

 

~

 

It’s not that Dick’s never thought _what if_ , because he has.

 

In the last hour alone, a generous handful of those thoughts have made him speculate. What if the prisoners had talked? What if the 506th had advanced over the river? And what if he’d never had to disobey a direct order from his superior?

 

Even if all else remained the same, he can't help but wonder what would have happened if he'd never seen Hoobler emerging from a shadow and disappearing in a burst of sea spray.

 

He might have woken up at his desk, aching and still tired. And he might’ve had to pretend to be disapproving when Nix regaled him with a paraphrased version of his falsified report, while secretly reveling in his enthusiasm. Life might have carried on just as it had been.

 

Yes, Dick occasionally wondered _what if._ It’s just that when it came to him and Nix, it had never really occurred to him that they could be more. Even if it had crossed his mind, he’d never entertained the idea, because it was impossible, unacceptable. Only, apparently it isn’t here.

 

When he finally makes his way back to the apartment, knocking because he doesn’t have a key, he finds that Elsie is gone and Nix is annoyed. It’s easy to tell because this incarnation of Nix broods exactly the same as his own. Dick shakes his head — he really shouldn’t think of any version of Nix as his own.

 

He bites his tongue as Nix turns from the door without a word. He doesn't need to see Nix’s face to know his stony expression is still firmly fixed in place as he moves to sit in front of what Elsie earlier referred to as his laptop.

 

Dick follows guiltily behind, pausing to stand awkwardly by one of the sofas while he waits for Nix to crack out some disappointed words that can’t possibly make him feel any worse than he already does.

 

He knows Not-Nix and Not-Dick are dating, that they’re living together — of course Nix is angry and hurt that Dick jumped away from their greeting after a day apart and ran off without a word for hours. Knowing this and knowing how to remedy it are two entirely different things, but the point still stands.

 

Dick breathes deep and tries to lose himself in the barely-there patterns of dark and light in the brown leather of the sofa. Across the room, Nix is silent, resolute in avoiding Dick’s gaze. The blue glow of the screen casts shadows across his face.

 

Clearing his throat, Dick braces himself. “You okay?”

 

“Fine,” Nix growls, glaring at him out of the corner of his eye. He lets out a little breath. “You gonna tell me what that was all about?”

 

Dick winces at the flat, hard tone. “I needed to burn off some energy, get some fresh air. I didn’t mean to be that long.”

 

“You were gone three hours.”

 

“You didn’t need to worry.”

 

Nix stares at him, incredulous. “You didn’t take your phone. Or your hat.”

 

“It’s not that cold.”

 

“Or your coat.”

 

Dick meets Nix’s eyes, feels the pressure weigh on him. The pressure of another life. He doesn't know what the other Dick would do, but he wants to tell Nix everything. To look him in the eye and tell him that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s not the man Nix thinks he is.

 

It doesn’t seem like he has anything to lose; running out into the frigid cold without a coat is enough of a case for insanity on its own. But if he tells Nix the truth, he’ll also have to admit that he has absolutely no idea where the other Dick has gone. Nix’s friend — _lover_ , a distant voice corrects — has disappeared, and Dick’s best guess is that he’s been thrown into the middle of a war zone. He can’t tell Nix that, he just can’t.

 

“I wasn’t outside the whole time,” he says slowly. Nix spares him a flat look which ends in a withering roll of the eyes. “I know, and I—I shouldn’t have left as soon as you got home. That was rude. And I wasn’t thinking… I should have watched the time. I’d have been worried too.”

 

Nix huffs irritably but the strain is gone from his shoulders and his face is softening. He kicks back the chair and walks closer. “A ‘hello’ would have been nice.”

 

“Nix, I’m trying to apologize.”

 

“Eight years together and you think I don’t know when you’re trying to apologize?”

 

Feeling emboldened by the smile Nix is holding back, he tries for a joke to test the water. “I don’t have to say sorry very often. Thought I’d give you a heads up.”

 

“Don't get cute,” Nix grumbles, but his lips look like they’re giving in to that smile. It wavers there, a little quirk at the corner of his mouth. There’s a beat of silence, then he laughs. It’s low, rough and warming.

 

When Nix‘s laugh has thawed the room, Dick says, “I _am_ sorry, Nix. I haven’t been feeling good today.”

 

It’s heartfelt because every word is true. He’s sorry for more than just his adrenalin-fuelled flight into the ice-cold cruelty of Chicago’s winter, and he's been feeling as far from good as he could possibly imagine. In all honesty, his mind had only just started to find solid ground a moment before it was sent free falling again by Nix’s ‘eight years’ revelation.

 

Nix sighs and a twinge of guilt flashes across his face. “Yeah, I’m sorry too. I just… I had a bad day at work. How do you feel now?”

 

Dick pauses. “Not myself.”

 

“Bit early for a mid-life crisis,” Nix says playfully as he moves past him to the kitchen. “There’s food here. You could warm it up.”

 

He could; he’d been excited and paid attention when Elsie had shown him the microwave earlier, but he doesn’t. He eats it cold, and ignores the open bottle of red wine on the counter, despite how tempting it is to dull his exposed nerves with alcohol. It’s just one of many new impulses he’s had to ignore since he woke up here.

 

As he eats, flavor bursting on his tongue, he sneaks little glances at Nix, finding comfort in the familiarity of his tousled thick black hair, the soft curve of his cheekbones. Dick's exhausted and confused, ripped from one life and thrown into another. These are the excuses he makes for himself when his body floods with heat.

 

He goes to bed early, pathetically evading Nix’s invitation to watch a movie. This particular excuse — accompanied by an illustrative yawn — is genuine, but it’s not the reason he settles under the sheets before Nix is even in the room.

 

In truth, he does it so that he can pretend to be asleep when Nix walks in around 11pm, and so he can remain in feigned sleep as Nix shucks his pants and slate gray t shirt, whispers goodnight and softly runs the backs of his fingers down Dick’s spine. Dick can feel the tingle of his touch burn through two layers of fabric.

 

If Nix thinks he’s wearing more clothes to bed than normal, he doesn’t say anything. He just settles against Dick’s back, forehead resting at the base of Dick’s neck like it's landing home, like that spot on Dick’s body is the dip in a well-worn, much-loved pillow that’s learnt its sleeper's shape by heart and refuses to return to how it was before.

 

The seconds tick by as Dick holds his breath, waiting until the exhalations against his spine have evened out into sleep. Only then does he let his brain — outgunned and outmaneuvered — melt into the rhythm of it, and rest.

 

In the dark, all Dick can smell is the sweetly heady scent of detergent on the sheets, and the warm, familiar smell of Nix.

 

~

 

The nightmares don’t start that night, but by the second, they hit hard. The first moment of consciousness is the hardest; the point when he wakes on his side like he always does, but knows that something’s wrong.

 

The disorientation makes his heart jump, but the panic only ever lasts a split second, because it’s not hard to remember where he is when Nix’s warm hand is on his waist, or his face is nuzzled into the space between his shoulder blade and the mattress.

 

The realization that he’s either insane or in a world he doesn’t belong in should panic him, but by day four those touches have Dick’s heart rate lowering almost instantaneously, and he doesn’t like to think too much about why.

 

The dreams he has aren’t like the ones he had at war, but they _are_ dreams and Dick’s sure people don’t dream within dreams. It blows the last of whatever misgivings he’d had about other worlds, other hims and other Nixes, to high heaven.

 

The days continue on in a lazy loop. He tries to fit in, mainly for the Dick that belongs here and will continue this life when things are flipped back to normal, but also for his own sanity.

 

Every morning is like relearning everything all over again. He spends the days before he has to go to work, to do a job he doesn’t know, trying to make sense of the notes and schedule on Not-Dick’s desk. He reads them over and over, to the point that when his first day on campus rolls around, it's almost a relief.

 

He was prepared. If Nix hadn’t tossed a throwaway comment over his shoulder about him getting a ride into work, he would have been ready to walk the route. As it happens, he opens the door ten minutes later to a friendly face.

 

“Hey, Lip!”

 

Lipton smiles, leading Dick to his car. “Been awhile since I heard that nickname.”

 

Dick whips his head up, puzzled and panicked. He can’t help not knowing everything about this place, but his gut sinks every time he realizes he might have messed up.

 

“Oh. Well, I’m feeling nostalgic,” he replies. It’s a gamble, but a fairly strategic one. Lip’s reaction had been mildly surprised but not shocked, as though Dick’s one of the people that used to call him by the nickname.

 

“Talking of nostalgia, you still on for tomorrow night?”

 

Dick purses his lips and listens to the rumble of tarmac under the tires. “Sure am,” he responds. He’ll have to work out what ‘tomorrow night’ actually means another time. He can’t afford to make Lip suspicious. Maybe Nix will indulge him if he tells him he’s forgotten and diverts him with a bottle of the extortionately expensive Chilean merlot he seems to like.

 

The campus is huge. Dick ghosts behind Lip through the labyrinthine hallways and staircases, committing the route to memory, until they reach the faculty lounge. When he sees that there’s hardly anyone else in the room he allows himself to relax.

 

Dick’s quiet when Lip talks of things he knows nothing about, but it’s easy to speak to him. He’s used to being selective about what he says, which is fortunate because most things he has to keep to himself. Like how excited he is that there’s a huge bag of sugar on the counter, and that it’s far easier jumping into occupied France than it is to translate half of the conversations he’d overheard as they’d walked through the hallways.

 

Lip smiles as he hands Dick a mug of coffee. The machine makes all sorts of fancy drinks but this is black with two sugars. There’s a strange comfort in knowing that the other Dick isn’t all that different if he takes his coffee exactly the same despite the dizzying array of alternatives.

 

When he looks up from the pool of dark liquid, Lip is leaning against the doorframe with his head hanging out into the hallway. Peering left and then right, he turns back to Dick with a very recognizable frown of concern and annoyance.

 

Lip exhales long and deep. “Where the hell’s Professor Dike?”

 

Laughter bursts out of Dick before he can stop it. Perhaps these worlds are more alike than he first thought. 


	4. Snowflakes

Dick doesn’t have any lectures or one-to-ones to bumble through for another couple of days, by which time he hopes these kids will be back in the capable hands of the actual Professor Winters.

 

He knows that he needs to do something about getting home again, but aside from shouting Hoobler’s name out loud, he has no idea how to track down a ghost. Dick almost knocks his papers off the desk when he realizes that if Hoobler is still alive in this reality, then he might not have to.

 

He follows signs for the library, crossing over the courtyard under a blue-black bruise of sky which threatens snow. Once inside the building, shaking the first wispy flakes from his hair, he flags down an officious-looking librarian.

 

“Can you help me? I’m trying to find an old friend. He might live nearby or work here.”

 

She looks him up and down sternly. “You can Google him, dear.”

 

Dick has to stop himself from looking to the heavens. “'Ma’am I could really use your help, if you’d be so kind.”

 

She looks suddenly flustered and an unexpected giggle escapes her. “‘Ma’am’... I like that. Alright, follow me.”

 

She sits at a desk, takes Hoobler’s name, and types furiously quickly. As distracted as Dick is by his ghost-search, he feels distinctly envious. If he could rattle out reports on a typewriter even half as quickly, he’d have more free time than he’d know what to do with.

 

The woman’s face blanches slightly and her eyes flick to Dick’s nervously. “I think—I, umm, he—”

 

Dick frowns, watching the librarian fiddle with her hair. He can tell it's a nervous tick. “What is it?”

 

“I’m sorry, but… he’s passed away. There was an accident and he… it was a gunshot wound.” Her voice seems very far away suddenly.

 

Dick exhales a shaky breath. The slow, sinking feeling is back; it’s just the same as when he’d heard Lip deliver the news the first time around.

 

“I’m so sorry, did you know him?”

 

“Yes. A lifetime ago.”

 

He thanks her and walks aimlessly away. Hoobler _is_ dead, and Dick’s back to the drawing board again.

 

The snow is coming down heavier now, slowly laying the foundations for a brilliant white blanket on the path outside the window. But Dick doesn’t see Chicago snow at all.

 

~

 

 ** _Ardennes, Belgium_** — ** _1944_**

 

“I think it’s still snowing.”

 

“Really,” Dick snorts. “I’m probably going to need you to verify that intel.”

 

Nix snickers, head already under the tarp because he thinks that getting a little more mileage out of the joke will cheer Dick up. When he re-emerges his raven hair is dusted with snowflakes. It makes the snow look so unassuming, so harmless. Everything it’s not.

 

Snow here isn’t like snow anywhere else. At its best, its brightness leaches out into the frozen earth and melts into clothes that stay damp for days. At its worst, it’s red. Red with the blood of men too young, too loved and too good to die in it.

 

“Yeah,” Nix affirms through the tarp, perfectly deadpan. “It’s still snowing.”

 

“I can see why you’re so valuable to Regiment,” Dick bites out. His sarcasm, not always easy to pick up on the best of days, is even harder to discern through the chatter of teeth, but Nix knows it’s there and he grins.

 

“We should make igloos,” Nix announces, throwing two thin blankets at Dick’s head.

 

They’re old and tatty, and Dick should really refuse them and send them to the next foxhole over, but Nix has almost definitely bartered for them and he’s pretty sure he won’t take no for an answer. Roll his eyes and call Dick a stubborn bastard, maybe.

 

“Igloos?” Dick echoes instead, hiding a little smile behind the blankets. He’s always happy to humor Nix’s segues.

 

“They’re warmer. And you can’t say we wouldn’t be camouflaged.”

 

“Think we might be lacking in some of the skills and tools to—”

 

“Yeah,” Nix cuts in, “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just piss on my nice, warm, imaginary fire,” he grumps. “But I do like that you’re honest.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah. Non-regulation igloos aside.” Nix settles next to Dick and steals a corner of the blanket.

 

“Don’t get too comfortable.”

 

Nix scoffs quietly. “Not likely.” He groans and tips his head back against the mud. “Christ, wake me in five. I have to scout out the 502.”

 

Strictly speaking, Nix doesn’t _have_ to. He doesn't have to be on the line at all. With another company, maybe he wouldn’t. Later, in the bitterness of a new snowy morning in Bastogne that’s as fragile as it is cold, he watches Dick battle with a razor and trembling hands, and he knows he won’t be going anywhere.

 

Dropping into their shared foxhole the next morning, Dick’s eyes immediately look for Nix. He’s sat huddled and small like he’s ten again and playing hide and seek in his too-big house, trying to evade his energetic younger sister. Only he’s shivering and his jaw is clenched, biting down to stop the click-clack rhythm of teeth jarring together.

 

Dick’s heart clenches at the sight. He pulls the tarp over and moves quickly to crouch at Nix’s feet. He doesn’t even think, just cups a hand to a pale cheek and tilts his head up.

 

“Lew?”

 

The scruff of Nix’s beard under his hand is surprisingly soft in contrast to the sharp chill of his skin. He’s checking for signs of hypothermia, because this isn’t like Nix at all, even in this hell hole. He’s quiet, way too quiet. 

 

“When was the last time you ate?”

 

Hazy, unfocused eyes lift slowly. They drift away from Dick’s face to stare off into the darkness. Although he’s loathe to do it, Dick turns his back to get rations, huffing impatiently with an uncooperative burner and waiting for a teasing jibe that doesn’t come.

 

He turns back, half expecting Nix to have fallen asleep, wishing that he had when he sees that while Nix’s eyes are open they are also hauntingly remote.

 

Dick swallows hard. His next words won’t receive a warm welcome. “You don’t need to be here.”

 

“And miss the soup of the day?” Nix stutters.

 

“You should go back to Regiment.”

 

Nix whips his head up. It’s the quickest Dick’s seen him move for hours. Even when the General arrived that morning, Nix was slow like there was lead in his veins.

 

The hurt in Nix’s eyes hurts Dick in turn, and he has to bite down on the tip of his tongue to stop himself from retracting the words. He wouldn’t normally do this, any other time he wouldn’t second guess his best friend, but this is important. He’s never seen Nix look so fragile.

 

The hurt sweeps away and in the blink of an eye Nix is angry. “No,” he says darkly.

 

“Just for a few hours. You could be behind the line and—”

 

“You honestly think I’d go?”

 

Dick bites the inside of his lip and shakes as adrenalin burns out of his system too quick. Nix likes honesty and Dick’s good at it. It doesn’t make it any easier to accept that there isn’t a chance in hell Nix will leave.

 

In the silence and heartbeats that follow, Nix coughs. His breath fogs the air before he tucks his face against his knees. “There you go,” he mutters. “Don’t ask me again.”

 

Dick takes a long breath that ices his lungs. “Yeah. Okay, Nix.” He finds himself rubbing Nix’s bicep through his jacket. “Well, look lively,” he says, tipping his head towards the burner. “Food’s nearly ready. And it's gourmet.”

 

His heart sings as Nix’s lips flicker into a smile.

 

~

 

Dick nearly walks into someone on the way out the library door. The main problem isn’t that he does, it’s that he doesn’t. Instead of bumping into a solid body, he walks straight through it.

 

He startles, turns and mutters a curse he’s glad Nix can’t hear, because in front of him is a semi-transparent Private Hall.

 

“Hall?!”

 

“John, yes sir,” the soldier nods.

 

Dick glances around quickly but for all intents and purposes the library is moving in just the same way as it had before. Throngs of students flow through the doors, sit at computers and locate their books. None of them are looking at the grayed-out boy in a World War II uniform that’s covered in blood and gore.

 

He continues to look directly at Hall even though half his face is missing and despite the fact that Dick feels the crushing weight of guilt and grief in exactly the way he had that day at Brecourt.

 

“How are you getting on, sir? I’m here to check in on you.”

 

The pain makes way for a flash of anger and Dick loses the battle he’s been warring with his patience ever since he woke up in his best friend’s bed, seventy years in the future.

 

“I need you to tell me exactly what’s going on here, private. Why am I here?” He pauses before quickly tacking on a slightly panicked, “And also, _how_ am I here?”

 

“Hoobler didn’t tell you?” Hall asks crossly. “He was meant to tell you. Trust that idiot—”

 

“ _Hall._ ”

 

Hall looks serious and Dick’s starting to miss Hoobler’s smiling face.

 

“Sorry, sir. The night before you came here, you made a choice. This is your chance to see what life could be like if you’d done it differently. In this reality it was a different situation but you were faced with the same choice.”

 

Already suspecting the answer, Dick asks, “What was the choice?”

 

Hall blushes and looks away. “Choosing Captain Nixon, sir.”

 

Dick can feel his own face heat too.

 

Clearing his throat, Hall continues, “You made a noble decision going against Colonel Sink’s orders. You did a good thing.” Dick thinks that if he hears that one more time he might snap. “I mean, you kind of disturbed the balance of things though,” Hall continues. “Martin and Jones were meant to die on that patrol.”

 

Dick clenches his teeth together. “What does that mean?”

 

“I don’t know,” Hall shrugs. Tendrils of silver smoke float up from his shoulders as though the movement has dislodged magical dust. “Probably nothing, but I wouldn’t know even if it did — it’s a little above my clearance level.”

 

Hall’s words make him think of a heavenly council with cabinet members, motions to grant or deny, and clouds the color of snow. Dick blinks away the memories of Bastogne that the image conjures, but he can’t shift Nix’s voice wrapping around the word ‘honest.’

 

“I need to tell him.”

 

“No!” Hall yells.

 

Dick jerks slightly in surprise, automatically looking around, only to find that everyone is carrying on as though there hasn’t been a disturbance at all.

 

“You can’t say anything to anyone! Hoobler was supposed to tell you the rules. Don’t tell Captain Nixon, it will mess things up!”

 

“Mess things up? Hang on, either I’m being rewarded or being punished. Either way, this isn’t as much fun as you and Hoobler seem to think it is, and I’m sure the other me would prefer to be here, with… his… Nix… than at war!”

 

“Just don’t say anything to anyone,” Hall says, looking down at himself as though any minute his very being could blow away.

 

“Wait! I need to know how to get back.”

 

“Someone will come when it’s the right time.”

 

“Hall—” Dick starts, but with a whip-crack noise, the ghost is gone.

 

~

 

While Nix is in the shower that evening, Dick finds himself calling out for both Hoobler and Hall in turn.

 

No ghostly apparitions appear, only Nix coming out of the bathroom in a towel with distracting water droplets rolling down his torso.

 

“Who the hell is Hall?”

 

Dick forces himself to look away, cheeks flaming as tantalizing hip bones imprint themselves into his memory.

 

He blushes more now than he ever did. And he can't blame Nix… not entirely. Some of the times he's had to duck his head or high tail it somewhere — anywhere — else, it’s been all on him. Like the way he'll lean into one of those casual touches, eyes fluttering closed before he remembers himself.

 

Dick clears his throat. “John Hall.” Nix looks skeptical. “Basketball,” Dick offers.

 

He has no idea if this version of them ever played basketball, but it’s the best he’s got.

 

Unfortunately, Nix is giving him that same odd look that he had in Carentan. Time feels like it's playing tricks on him and now Dick’s starting to wonder if the 1940's version of Hall was ever actually in the 506th basketball team at all. In fact, he’s beginning to wonder if _he_ ever was. He’s falling into such a comfortable flow with Not-Nix that sometimes it’s hard to think that he was ever anywhere else.

 

Deep in thought, he only just catches the sound of a knock at the door.

 

“That’s Harry,” Nix says, throwing his towel casually onto the floor and forcing Dick to pivot around on the spot with a fierce heat racing through his body. “We’ve got Trigger tonight.”

 

Dick’s quickly learnt that he and Nix act as regular babysitters. So much so, they actually bought the cot that Trigger sleeps in just for the overnighters. Given Dick’s limited experience with kids, it’s come as a bit of shock how easily he’s taken to it.

 

Harry enters the apartment with armfuls of baby paraphernalia and it’s actually hard to find and then extricate Trigger from amongst the bundles. Now dressed, Nix helps with the exchange of stuff.

 

Something about opening the door to Harry reminds Dick of his conversation with Lip earlier.

 

“Nix, do we have plans tomorrow night?” he asks over his shoulder, holding Trigger against his chest as he dumps the diaper bag onto the sofa.

 

“Oh yeah,” Nix drawls. “Tomorrow’s Speirton night.”

 

Harry chuckles as Dick tries to hide his confusion.

 

“Speirton, huh?” Harry considers. “Is this a regular thing?”

 

“They come over once a month and we make dinner. By we, I of course mean Dick.”

 

Dick holds the baby tighter for fear of dropping him. He can’t cook a proper meal in this kitchen, the stove doesn’t make sense and all the utensils seem ridiculously overpowered.

 

“You joining us?” Nix asks Harry with a teasing tone.

 

Harry shudders dramatically. “And spend the night on the receiving end of Speirs’ glare? No thank you. Although,” he pauses, smacking a kiss to Trigger’s head and walking back to the door. “He does have the Veela affect going for him.”

 

Nix chuckles like it's a familiar joke between them, a long established reference that’s not necessarily funny but is endlessly amusing to them. The sound is a bubble of genuinely amused laughter that makes Dick’s anxiety evaporate in wisps of steam under the heat of it.

 

When the warmth of Nix’s joy ebbs, Dick’s frown returns. He still can’t get used to not having any clue what’s being said. He knows enough to know that Veela probably isn’t a beef dish.

 

Nix tilts his head to Dick. “Don’t look at him for a laugh. You know he never read Harry Potter.”

 

“You haven’t even seen the films?” Harry demands. Dick doesn’t risk a look at Nix, he just shakes his head. “Heh. Google ‘Veela’. Then next time you see Speirs looking like a model whilst simultaneously looking like he might pull out your spine and fashion it into a belt, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

 

“Ronald Speirs?” Dick repeats for clarity. It _does_ sound like a pretty accurate description.

 

“The one and only,” Nix says. He takes Trigger out of Dick’s arms and settles him on his hip. It’s incredibly domestic and Dick’s mind trips for a second. “Harry, you’ve never properly met him. He’s actually fairly normal.” Dick watches Nix’s eyes slide off to the side in contemplation. “He’s a marine,” he adds by way of explanation.

 

“Figures,” Harry mutters. “He has deadly eyes. I don’t need to meet him, seeing him stalk in and out of your apartment is enough.”

 

As Harry leaves, Dick echoes his goodbye but his mind is on other things. This world has a Ronald Speirs too. There are so many similarities, like the universe has taken everything he knows and has turned it on its head in sick mimicry.

 

“Speirton,” Dick mutters, then stops. “Oh. Speirs and Lipton.”

 

“It’s what I’m going to call them from now on.”

 

“Because they’re together,” Dick nods thoughtfully. “Do you think they love each other?”

 

Nix throws him a strange look. “That’s why they’re getting married, Dick.”

 

Dick’s brain stalls. “Married?”

 

His mind’s running a mile a minute and he knows he’s letting his guard down too much. If Nix isn’t suspecting something’s off by now, he will soon.

 

“Yeah, married,” Nix says. “Wanna try it someday?”

 

Dick feels like he’s walking towards a baited trap he’s laid for himself. Fortunately he’s becoming a dab hand at diverting Nix from his slip ups. “No thanks, I’d never marry Speirs.”

 

Nix glances up. “Too pushy?”

 

“Too mono-syllabic.”

 

“Thought you had a type. You always fell for the dark hair, dark eyes, broody types.”

 

“Strange how things change isn’t it,” Dick retorts with a teasing smile.

 

Nix snorts, clasping his heart in mock offence. “Charming.”

 

There’s a sort of happy calm in the air, and Dick feels high on Nix and his little hits of laughter, relieved that he’s recovered from yet another gaff, content to watch Trigger try and eat Nix’s hair. And there’s another emotion he’s trying to place as his stomach swoops at the sight of Nix looking up at him from under his eyelashes.

 

He has absolutely no idea whether Not-Dick wants to marry Not-Nix, but this one can’t help but wonder about it.

 

“How was your day?” Nix asks, sprawling on the sofa and lying Trigger down on his chest. “Could you pass me the baby snacks? Actually, forget that. No, not that — I still need the snacks.”

 

Dick huffs and only stops himself throwing the box at Nix’s head because Trigger might bear the brunt of it.

 

“I want to guess,” Nix explains, offering Trigger a single snack whilst trying to wrestle the box out of the baby’s other hand. “I can tell which part of the syllabus you’re teaching by your mood. Holocaust, am I right? The terms just run into each other, how are we back around to that again? Should we maybe not talk about the Holocaust around the baby?” He pauses, thinking seriously. “Or maybe we _should_ talk about it around the baby.”

 

“He does have a name,” Dick offers, an attempt at misdirection because he doesn’t know what a ‘holocaust’ is or why Nix’s tone is edged when he says it. “But, umm…” he looks down at the notes on the coffee table, “no, it’s the Roman Empire.” He’s proud it doesn’t sound like a question.

 

Nix makes a little noise of acknowledgement. “Well, can we just pretend that I know how my boyfriend’s work schedule goes? I’m going to have to start making _better boyfriend_ notes. Starting with Speirton tomorrow.” He gets up from the sofa and carefully hands Trigger to Dick. “I have to do some work. Are you okay to watch him? If we don’t win this case it’s on me, and there’s no fucking way I’m going to give Sobel an excuse to fire me.”

 

It’s the first mention of Sobel, and it's come at a time when Dick was daring to hope that he wouldn’t make an appearance in this world.

 

“And how is our friend?”

 

“Snafu.”

 

Dick nods, because that he does understand.

 

Nix is smiling down at him and it’s soft considering they’ve just discussed Sobel. His expression is tender and warm as he slowly strokes a hand along Dick’s jaw. Dick doesn’t flinch as sparks shiver across his skin.

 

Nix eventually drops his hand, still smiling, and moves to sit at his computer.

 

Dick gazes at him for a few minutes before he forces himself to get up and walk Trigger to the window where snow is falling in a heavy curtain of white. With each shaky breath, he tries to ignore the flutter in his stomach and the desire in his veins.

 

He steals another glance, sighs, and lifts Trigger up to the window so he can giggle at the cotton wool street.


	5. Codes

He’s an impersonator now. And that noun is generous. God’s truth, he feels like a fraud, living a life that another Dick has built.

 

He doesn’t recognize this life, let alone own it, but he still knows Nix like the back of his hand. He’s the one constant between the two worlds. Maybe that’s the point of this after all, but the way Dick finds himself interacting with this Nix, with mutual trust and easy affection, is so familiar that Dick sometimes thinks he could almost be back in his own world. In an attic room in Holland, opening his footlocker and wondering why he cares that Colonel Dobie’s eyes linger on Nix too long, or in a fleeting moment on a foggy night in Aldbourne when just the briefest imagining of a peace-time future was too abstract and opaque to dwell on.

 

The variations between the Nix in Chicago and the Nix in 1945 are few and far between. It boils down to tiny details. And the small matter of sex.

 

The moment Dick realizes that the only difference between the relationships he has with the two Nixes is physical intimacy, he chokes on his coffee. Nix snorts in amusement and calls him an idiot, then in the next breath he says, “I love you.”

 

Sometimes Dick starts to forget where he comes from, starts to believe he can have something he can’t. When that happens, he reaches for the smooth skin on his ankle where a scar should be. He rubs it like a talisman, breathes deep and keeps moving forward.

 

~

 

There are nights when he doesn’t dream as such. It’s more like he’s remembering in sleep, but the resurfacing memories replay in sepia like they’re years old instead of days.

 

In this memory, he’s running over to engage, face to face with a boy. Behind his eyelids there’s crimson and sparks. But this time, there’s no blood and no smoking gun.

 

He feels a chill on his skin, but it’s not fear. It’s a shiver in the wake of warm fingertips. Pleasure trickles across his skin like every other time he wakes up hard and rocking into his hand, half asleep. But unlike all those times, he has one hand under the pillow and one on top of it, and the fingers trailing down his chest belong to Nix.

 

He’d known this was going to happen. It was obvious as early on as the first morning when he’d woken to the naked press of Nix’s body, so close it was like having a second skin. It was inevitable that Nix would initiate something sooner rather than later, it’s just that Dick hadn’t expected to be overwhelmed with this helpless coil of desire.

 

The pads of Nix’s fingers skim down his chest, a hot brand even through the material of his shirt. Nix goes to roll him onto his back and Dick lets him, then he’s meeting brown eyes with a sort of startled lust and gasping with a new wave of adrenalin.

 

“It’s Saturday,” Nix says in a low voice, leaning down to nuzzle into the sweep of Dick’s shoulder.

 

Dick shivers. “Saturday’s a good day.” He’s trying for a neutral response that won’t show him up for the fraud he is, but it’s increasingly difficult when Nix is brushing heated kisses against his shoulder, his neck, the hollow behind his ear that he never knew was so sensitive.

 

“Mmm,” Nix hums huskily and Dick can feel the vibrations all the way to his bones. “No work. And if you can find it in yourself to get turned on by ‘dark hair, dark eyes and broody’ again, I’m all yours.”

 

Dick breathes out a shaky laugh even though his brain is misfiring and he’s trying very hard not to move in case it brings Nix’s hand closer to his growing erection; he may have reconciled himself to the lust, but acting on it is a step he’s not yet ready for. Then again, Nix’s eyes are darkening as he rolls his lower lip between his teeth, biting down, and Dick is seriously reconsidering that viewpoint.

 

A finger slips under his waistband and Dick freezes. In the same second, Nix’s cell phone rings.

 

“Or maybe I’m not,” Nix groans, throwing his weight across Dick to get at his phone. “Hold that thought.”

 

Dick is holding it. And his breath. And a precarious fingertip grasp on the hope that Nix will either move off of him or further on top of him.

 

As Nix snipes at the probably unassuming person on the other end of the call, he traces idle patterns in the trail of hair above Dick’s waistband, making him sigh and smile at the tickle until Nix stops and drags himself out of bed with a curse.

 

“I’ve been called in,” he says regretfully, rummaging around for a shirt. He looks over his shoulder. “Sorry.”

 

Dick’s voice is strained when he tells him it’s okay, and when Nix goes to leave with a soft, “See you tonight,” he responds wholeheartedly and wonders when he’d started to say, “Can’t wait,” and truly mean it.

 

~

 

That night, he remembered almost too late, was the night Speirs and Lipton were coming for dinner.

 

With his most practical head engaged, he’d surveyed the kitchen and the contents of the fridge and promptly enlisted Kitty’s help. An unknowing partner in deception, she either didn’t know that Dick usually cooked or she was minding her own business in keeping the observation to herself.

 

When Nix gets home, there’s a pasta dish in the oven and a bowl of salad on the side which Dick is moving around with tongs to give the impression he’s been cooking all day.

 

Nix looks smart in his suit even with the tie loosened and his hair a disheveled mess. As he drops his briefcase on the sofa, Dick lets his eyes trail the sweep of his eyelashes, cheekbones and jaw, the curving line of his throat and the tantalizing squeeze of his lip between his teeth.

 

“Traffic’s bad,” Nix announces, planting a kiss to Dick’s cheek. “I hope Ron and Car are coming the back way.”

 

“The secret back route,” Dick comments as he prods at the lettuce. He throws these little guess statements out quite casually now. It’s like his own little game of risk, because while there’s an underlying fear that the next one may have him running into a brick wall, he has to say something.

 

He’s sure he’s already made dozens of faux pas, but Nix either hasn’t spotted them or has decided not to call him out. If it’s the former, Dick knows he should be worried because that would go against everything he knows about Nix. Maybe the errors simply aren’t bad enough for Nix to stumble on.

 

“If by ‘secret’ you mean everyone in Chicago knows, then yes, the secret back route.” Nix leans back in to kiss Dick’s cheek again. “But don't let me ruin your CIA fairytale.” He’s too busy swiping a crouton to spot Dick’s look of confusion.

 

Dick sighs, partly because his salad is a crouton poorer, but mostly because he has a new acronym to look up.

 

Nix moves to the bedroom. “In other news, Sobel’s a fucking idiot,” he calls though the wall.

 

“You always say he’s a genius.”

 

“Yeah well, he’s an ingenious idiot.”

 

Dick barely glances up from where he’s rearranging the bowl so the croutons are once again symmetrical. “You know that everything he does is to get a rise out of you, don’t you?”

 

“It damn well works,” Nix replies. Dick hears him walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower. “God, what I wouldn’t give for a demotion.”

 

~

 

As a conversational point, Sobel helps Dick out a lot that evening. While the irony isn’t lost on him, he allows himself the luxury of basking in the relief of easy conversation.

 

Dick gets the feeling that Sobel has been discussed before on Speirton nights — in depth and on a number of occasions. In fact, one of the very first questions out of Ron’s mouth is, “What’s the latest with Sobel?”

 

Nix pulls a face. Since his shower, he’s been as charismatic as ever, warm as the fire in the room and twice as bright. Dick tries not to think about how beautiful he is, except it's all he can think about.

 

“The usual,” Nix says lazily, pouring generous helpings of wine from a decanter. Dick has to stop himself from covering his glass. “Nothing a long bath in an active volcano won’t fix.”

 

Lip catches Dick’s eye. “Sounds like progress,” he observes with a smile.

 

Nix throws a napkin at him. “Yeah well, I hate that son of a bitch. When I eventually clamber over him on the career ladder, don’t be surprised if I kick his hands off the rung.” He looks at Ron. “Let's put it this way, I’m going to need you again for the office Christmas party. Same deal as last time: just look intimidating.”

 

Ron raises an eyebrow. “If I had known that’s why I was there last year, I might have tried harder.”

 

Nix’s shit eating grin says, _No need._

 

Ron smiles, all teeth. “Dick had it covered anyway.”

 

“What do you mean?” Nix sits up straighter in his chair, interest piqued. He turns a teasing smile on Dick. "I always miss the fun. Did you cause a scene again?”

 

“Hardly,” Dick responds automatically, although he’s now starting to wonder whether outside of the constraints of rank and duty, he might actually go ahead and sock Sobel right in the face.

 

“It’s what Sobel was after,” Ron points out over the rim of his glass. “He wanted Dick to lose it. Mouthing off about you like he always does. Dick reminded him he doesn’t sit in the CEO suite yet so he can fuck off.”

 

Dick tries not to choke on his water.

 

“The last part was intimated,” Lip corrects. “But Sobel got the picture. Should have seen his face.”

 

Nix’s eyes dart to Dick with a slightly awed expression. Dick feels like he needs to say something under the heat of it, but once again he’s dodging landmines. In the end he falls back on what he knows. “Sobel’s easily riled. You just have to know what buttons to press.”

 

Nix positively beams at him. “Aww Dick, I love it when you’re salty and give zero fucks. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have treated you to one of those disgusting iced green teas you like.”

 

“Careful, Nix. I’ll end up spoiled,” Dick retorts, wondering what green tea tastes like as he gets up to fetch the food.

 

At the end of Nix’s chuckle, Lip asks, “You ever think about starting up on your own?”

 

“Nah,” Nix responds off-hand. He’s not being rude, but it’s clear to Dick that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

 

Ron continues regardless. “He’s an idiot if he doesn’t realize that those clients are really your clients. You’ve been smoothing over that guy’s personality for years. They’d be in deep shit if you left.”

 

As Dick’s carrying the filled plates back to the table, Nix is intently studying the rich red in his glass. “They’d survive.”

 

“A law firm is only as good as its lawyers,” Lip suggests softly.

 

Dick clears his throat. “You don’t have to stay there,” he points out, keeping his eyes on Nix.

 

“And have to grovel to my father? No thanks.”

 

Dick frowns. “You don’t have to do that either.”

 

It’s immediately obvious that he’s said the wrong thing. The tension spikes between them. Nix’s eyes harden and Dick’s grip tightens on his fork.

 

“You know we’d lose this place if I did neither.”

 

They've clearly had this conversation before. Judging by Nix’s tone, those conversations have probably all spiralled into arguments.

 

Dick holds Nix’s challenging gaze and takes a bite of food even though he feels nauseous. The lurch of his gut is mostly to do with the idea that he’s hurt or offended Nix, but it’s also that he’s scared about the mess he may end up handing back to the Dick of this world.

 

Lip’s eyes flick between them, carefully assessing, brows drawn in concern. “Sounds like Sobel and your father could have been separated at birth.”

 

“Apparently, I traded one ignorant asshole for another.”

 

“Except they’re not are they?” Speirs interjects.

 

“Assholes?”

 

“Ignorant.”

 

“No,” Nix agrees. “They’re fucking pros and both of them have me where they want me.”

 

Nix sighs and Dick gets the impression he’s looking for a way to change the subject, to turn the conversation and lighten his own mood. It’s like the melancholy fades on the exhale, because his face is almost instantly brighter when he looks at Dick. “What about you, Dick?” he asks with sparkling eyes. “Have you got me where you want me?”

 

Dick coughs at the innuendo, eyes darting around the table. Ron and Lip remain relaxed and smiling; they don’t seem to hear anything unusual in Nix’s flirting.

 

Dick shakes himself, because of course they don’t. Not here, not in a world where a person is free to love who they want and are free to express it too.

 

He aches to flirt back, and only partly in order to diffuse the spark in Nix’s eyes so they can get back to safer ground.

 

All he’d have to do is nod, dip his head on an embarrassed smile, say something flippant, or sarcastic, or hell… something true, because now he knows that, yes: this is exactly how he wants Nix.

 

But there’s a bigger part of him that’s running scared. So all he says is, “Sorry you had a bad day, Nix.”

 

Turns out, he really didn’t want to snuff out that spark after all. Every part of him feels crushed to see it flicker and fade. Nix’s handsome face falls into a frown, the tiny flash of hurt doesn’t feel so tiny to Dick.

 

“Yeah, well,” he says, voice now missing its smile, “maybe I could do something else. Naval boat building is in the family somewhere.”

 

Dick holds his silence as Lip smoothly prompts Ron into talking about his career. He listens intently, not only because he finds this Speirs just as fascinating as the one he knows, but because he feels like a shadow’s settling over the room. Lip saw it. That’s why he’d moved the conversation forward, and Dick knows he owes him for that.

 

By the time Lip starts talking about wedding  plans — apparently Ron’s finally booked the caterer but not before taste-testing most of Chicago — the tension in the room has dissipated, like it’s been decompressed, and all of them with it. Without realizing it, Dick is loose and at ease again.

 

“It’s the same caterer we’re using for the faculty holiday party actually,” Lip comments. He takes a bite of food then casually adds, “Which reminds me, the higher ups have already said that someone needs to make sure Dike stays for the whole event this time.”

 

Speirs looks up, folding his arms over his chest. “No. Absolutely not.”

 

Nix chuckles into his glass. “Subtle, Carwood.”

 

Lip smiles at Ron in that way he does sometimes when he ducks his head slightly.

 

“No chance,” Ron says, tone firmer. “We’re not doing it,” but the tiniest hint of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth when Lip looks up at him.

 

Lip surrenders his hands. “I didn’t say anything.”

 

“Not explicitly, no.”

 

Lip relents. “We’ll just have to stay with him for a bit. It’s not like you have to hold his hand or anything.”

 

“We’ll do it,” Dick says, even though he can tell that the last of Ron’s will power was crumbling in the face of Lip’s pleading eyes.

 

This version of Speirs shows his layers more willingly that any situation in 1945 would ever allow. Or maybe the only difference is Lip.

 

Dick’s gaze flicks between them. He’s just thinking about their mirrors back in Haguenau when Nix stops grinning and says, “I think I might be pairing socks that evening.”

 

“I wish you would,” Dick snipes with a little smile as he recalls the litter of mismatched socks on the bedroom floor when he woke up. “But I can keep an eye on him, you don’t have to be there.”

 

Nix rolls his eyes. “Like I’d bail on you.” He makes a flippant comment about love conquering sock disputes, and Dick can’t move on for a while. He’s thinking about every time this Nix has said he loves him, and how it feels like September sun and tastes a lot like home.

 

Meanwhile, Ron starts talking about more wedding plans, which is actually really endearing although Dick is inclined to think he just wants to change the subject before Dick backs out of his offer to babysit Dike.

 

Next to him, Nix brushes the back of his hand against his thigh. It’s a gentle touch, not sexual, but intimate. It feels a bit like an olive branch.

 

Relieved, Dick shoots a smile Nix’s way before turning back to Ron. Nix’s fingers continue to work little patterns against Dick’s leg, soft taps then looping strokes. It feels nice and he lets himself preen under the touch while he tracks the conversation.

 

It’s not until he catches Nix watching him intently that he realizes that something’s off again.

 

He meets Nix’s gaze, heart stalling. After a pause, Nix starts moving his fingers again in random patterns that Dick suddenly understands aren’t random at all. Expectant eyes skip over his face for any sign of reaction and the finger movements seem even more pointed.

 

With a lurching sensation, Dick understands that Nix is tapping out some sort of message. One he can’t decode quick enough and one he was probably expected to have replied to ages ago. Dick can feel his whole body revolt, recoil back and kick start at double time.

 

Before he can do or say anything, Nix moves his hand away. When he opens his mouth to speak, Dick wonders if this is the moment his lie is shattered wide open.

 

“Dick?” Nix asks, like he knows something is very, very wrong, as though if they were on their own he would just come straight out and demand, _“What the hell’s wrong with you?”_

 

Later Dick thinks that he really owes Lipton a service medal for the way he volunteers Dike’s name as an answer to Nix’s unspoken question. He goes one better and re-directs the conversation to campus news, and Dick doesn’t even care that he has to talk about Dike again. If it means he never has to see that look in Nix’s eye again, he’ll talk about Dike to the grave.

 

~

 

When they’re alone again, Nix is quiet and broody. The atmosphere speaks volumes, but Nix doesn’t say a word about the code. In fact, neither of them speak at all until the next morning when Nix is back to wearing his best rakish smile.

 

The smile suggests that for now at least, Nix is content to ignore it. To say Dick is relieved is an understatement. He’s never been afraid to the disturb the peace if it means getting to the bottom of a problem and dealing with it, but in this case he has absolutely no idea how to remedy the situation without coming clean.

 

It’s comforting when Harry drops the kids off for a few hours. Elsie’s smart and she’s gotten him out of sticky situations before. When Nix goes out to get groceries, Dick watches his car pull away from the curb and immediately finds Elsie in the spare room.

 

“Do they talk in codes?”

 

Her face morphs into comical confusion. “Huh?”

 

“Sorry. I mean, do Uncle Rich and Uncle Lew have a special code they use to speak to each other? I need to learn it. Right now.”

 

She deals him in for a game of Old Maid.

 

“I have no idea,” she shrugs, but her face is apologetic. “That sounds really fun though,” she adds as though it will make Dick feel better.

 

“Why did they have to have a code?”

 

It’s a rhetorical question borne of frustration, but Elsie answers anyway. “Because they love each other. Uncle Lew was probably just telling you how much he loves you.” She places a winning card down on the carpet, but Dick isn’t paying attention. “Only he was probably having to say it over and over again because you were ignoring him.”

 

Dick groans. If he feels any more guilt, he wouldn’t be surprised if it starts to flow out of him.

 

“Maybe you just need to use actual words more.”

 

“You talk enough for all of us,” Dick says with a smile. “Do all children talk this much these days?”

 

After a couple of games, Elsie looks at him carefully. “Not to be rude,” she starts slowly, “and I really like you... but when’s Uncle Rich going to be back?”

 

“Soon, I hope. First I need to work out how to swap us again. Someone must know.”

 

“My dad knows everything.”

 

“I’m not sure he knows the answer to this.”

 

“Then this is seriously bad,” she intones.

 

Yes. Dick’s inclined to agree. “Hall said someone would come when the time’s right.”

 

She looks at him doubtfully but turns without another word when they hear voices through the wall.

 

“That’s your mom and dad,” Dick says, gathering the cards. “Reshuffle for me?”

 

Harry and Kitty have intercepted Nix in the hallway which means that by the time Dick gets to the living room, they’re all walking into the apartment, laden down with grocery bags and trying not to trip up as Billy circles around their feet.

 

“I thought you might have forgotten you have children,” Nix is saying to Harry as Dick pries a box from the crook of his elbow.

 

Kitty rolls her eyes at Nix, but she’s serious when she turns to Dick and asks, “You don’t really mind looking after them do you? You know you could just say if it’s too much.”

 

“I absolutely don’t mind,” Dick assures her, slightly surprised. It hadn’t really occurred to him to mind.

 

Kitty nods, a grateful smile on her face. “Well, we appreciate it. I know we rely on you a lot.”

 

Nix mirrors Dick’s reassuring smile, but Dick can see the glint of mischief in his eyes. “He asks for it. You can’t be a kid person and a safe pair of hands and not expect to get babysitting duties.”

 

When Dick looks down at his hands, all he sees are weapons. Unknowing or uncaring, Trigger grabs his finger and pulls it towards him with a delighted coo.

 

Harry and Kitty sit on stools by the kitchen counter as Dick starts up the coffee machine. He and Nix work around each other seamlessly as Nix unloads the groceries, cussing as he narrowly saves a jar of olives from dropping to the floor.

 

“Not in front of a lady, Nix,” Dick admonishes.

 

Harry looks at him strangely but Kitty just chuckles and says, “Don’t worry, I can deal with these fucking losers myself.”

 

“Well that’s certainly true,” Nix laughs. “Oh, shit. Dick, we need to talk about next week.”

 

“Next week?”

 

“Oh good, you’ve forgotten,” Nix says happily. “Don’t worry about it then.”

 

“No, come on.”

 

“New Jersey.” Nix shudders, only partly for dramatic effect.

 

Kitty tilts her head to the side in question. “New Jersey?”

 

Well that just goes to show the last time Not-Dick and Not-Nix went there. They obviously don’t even speak much about the place.

 

“What’s in New Jersey?” she asks.

 

“A big house with my name on it,” Nix answers sulkily, reaching down to stroke the top of Billy’s head.

 

Harry smirks. “More like a whole town with your name on it.”

 

“Did you tell your parents we’d be there?” Dick enquires softly.

 

Nix winces. “Yes?” Dick opens his mouth but Nix speaks before the words make it to his lips. “I know what you’re going to say,” he sighs, bumping his hip gently against Dick’s. The tension Dick’s felt since the night before starts to evaporate.

 

“Are there any earthquakes predicted in New Jersey?” Harry’s tone makes it less of a question and more of a suggestion.

 

Nix perks up. “One specifically located under the big house with my name on it would be ideal.”

 

Dick rolls his eyes, passes Nix a mug of coffee, and despite all the reasons not to, he brushes a kiss to his cheek, short and quick. Just a tiny peck that means nothing and everything all at once.


	6. Glimpse

This time, he’s not jumping.

 

He never hesitates, they’re trained _not_ to hesitate, but here he is, immobile at the door. It’s so vivid. This pounding fear, the ache of paralysis.

 

He hears the jumpmaster repeat himself. “Go, go, go,” shouted in his ear, but his feet are frozen in place.

 

In the other ear there’s a different voice urging him on in a quiet whisper, but in the way of dreams it’s somehow audible over the roaring engine and the thunder of gunfire.

 

He looks over his shoulder. Nix is smiling. Smiling as though they’re not about to parachute into Normandy, as though Dick isn’t refusing to jump. As though he was ever in Dick’s stick in the first place.

 

“One okay,” Nix says. “You’re one okay. Just walk off the edge. Nothing to it.”

 

A sharp noise crawls up Dick’s throat. “I can’t.” He feels fused in place. Feet on the edge and hands at the door, ready, but physically unable to move. He’s looking right into Nix’s eyes and he just can’t move. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

 

A sudden pain flickers across Nix’s face. “Don’t you trust me?”

 

Dick’s entire world tilts. Then he’s being hauled out of the plane like the air is ripping him away and throwing him into the sky. When he goes to pull the cord, the parachute doesn’t deploy, but it’s too late anyway.

 

When he wakes, he can’t breathe until he feels the tickle of hair against his shoulder blade and the pressure of Nix’s forehead against the top of his spine.

 

_~_

He’s trying to teach Trigger what he knows of sign language when Nix stomps in, throwing the door shut with unnecessary force, and staring at Dick as though he’s seen horrors he can’t describe.

 

Dick winces because how can he? But he forces the thought aside. It’s not fair to compare this Nix with his own. This Nix wasn’t a paratrooper, he hasn’t been to war, and Dick is glad.

 

Dick drops his hands. Sign language is starting to feel a bit too much like a code and it sours his mood. He puts Trigger down in the play pen where he happily squirms and squeezes the life out of an unsuspecting stuffed cow, and Dick starts on the dishes.

 

“Sobel?” Dick asks, looking over at Nix cautiously.

 

“Who the fuck else?”

 

It’s not the first time he’s thought Nix to be an adorable grump. It probably says something about Dick that he finds even the man’s scowl charming.

 

“Did you tell him to go to hell?”

 

Nix’s anger flips to amusement. “Basically.”

 

Mood apparently lifted, Nix wraps his arms around Dick’s waist and runs his lips up the side of his neck. Dick can feel the tiny bit of give when he grips a plate too tight.

 

“How was your day?” Nix asks softly.

 

Dick’s answer turns to dust on his tongue when Nix slides a hand down past his waistband and over his cock. “I—”

 

He can feel Nix smile against his neck and then the fingers grind down gently and squeeze. The burst of pleasure is hot and sharp and electric. He sucks in a breath, can’t stop the words that fall from his lips. “I’ve never done this before,” he gasps, giving little abortive rocks of his hips into Nix’s hand.

 

“I know for a fact that’s not true,” Nix chuckles into his ear. “I’ve never been more sure.”

 

Dick’s heart jumps into his throat as he turns to look over his shoulder. “No, Lew. I mean, really.”

 

Lifting his head from Dick’s neck, Nix’s lips curl into a wicked grin. “Aaah, alright. I gotcha.” He rolls forward and Dick can feel him, hard and needy, against his ass.

 

Teeth scrape over Dick’s hammering pulse point and it feels wonderful except for the cold panic firing flight hormones down his spine.

 

“What is it?” Nix murmurs, still trailing kisses and making Dick wonder why he’s protesting. Then Nix whispers a name. One that’s his but isn’t his. And Dick has to stop this so he says the first thing that comes to mind.

 

“Nothing, it’s just…. Dike, he didn’t—”

 

“Jesus, Dick,” Nix exclaims, hand now motionless against Dick’s zipper. “Do you have to?!” He pulls himself away with a sigh and a groan while Dick wonders on a sliding scale exactly how annoyed he is.

 

It’s not hard to look sheepish, but Dick also thinks his expression might be one of disappointment too. “Sorry,” he mutters.

 

“Go on,” Nix huffs, clearly giving up on the bulge in his pants, “what’s he done now?”

 

“He set the wrong assignment.” Dick watches Nix guiltily as he pulls two wine glasses from the cabinet. “And didn’t turn up for his mentoring sessions.”

 

“If it’s getting worse, you need to talk to the board. I’m not completely cold hearted, I can see the guy needs some support, and I’m talking therapy not just teaching cover, but you can’t keep doing this, Dick.”

 

Dick lifts his eyes. “Lip took this one. We take it in turns.”

 

“I repeat, you can’t pick up his slack forever.”

 

“Well he’s not resigning any time soon, and I don’t see how they’d get rid of him.”

 

“Maybe because he can’t do his damn job,” Nix says smoothly. “Just off the top of my head.”

 

Dick blinks at him. He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I wish it were that simple.”

 

“Well it is. They have the ability to get rid of him. He’s privileged but he’s still accountable to general employment law. Why do you think I bother? I don’t want to give Sobel the satisfaction of firing me. The only reason Dike’s still there is because someone wants him there.”

 

“Sobel won’t fire you. He needs you.”

 

Nix sighs and puts the wine bottle on the stone counter with a firm clunk. “I need to pack.”

 

~

 

In the car to New Jersey, Nix is tense. It hadn’t crossed Dick’s mind that this Nix might be a smoker. He hasn’t seen him with a cigarette, not once, but his fingers are twitching against the wheel like he might have smoked at some point and given up. That would explain why he's always chewing the ends of his pens, which in turn explains why he accused Dick of always hiding his fountain pen. Dick hasn't, but he can see why Not-Dick might have.

 

On the wheel, Nix’s fingers tense and rub against the leather. Without thinking, Dick threads his hand through Nix’s and gets a small smile in response.

 

Nix talks about a _road trip of doom_ playlist and does something with his cell phone which strikes up a concert orchestra in the car. As they drive and the music plays, Nix’s muscles start to relax.

 

A quarter of the way through the journey, his phone abruptly switches from Rachmaninov to a viscously shrill ring tone.

 

“Can you answer that for me?” Dick warily picks the phone up and fumbles around. “If it’s Sobel, tell him we’re fucking,” Nix instructs.

 

Dick flushes and tries to fight the confusing twist of lust that’s snaking through his core.

 

“With any luck it’ll give him a heart attack,” Nix continues.

 

“It’s Harry.”

 

Finally the call connects and Dick answers, cringing when he sounds stern and out of breath.

 

“Are you already vacation fucking?!” Harry demands. “What have I told you? _Never_ answer the phone to me when you two are doing _anything_ that makes you sound like that!”

 

“We’re in the car, Harry,” Dick says and tries not to smile.

 

“Wha—? Dick, I’m hanging up right now.”

 

“Relax, we’re driving. What it is?”

 

Harry groans like he’s unconvinced. “Kitty made me call to say ‘Happy Luz’s Day.’”

 

Dick screws his face up. That makes no sense whatsoever. “Okay. Umm… thanks.” There’s a moment’s silence when Harry probably expects him to say something related, but Dick’s at a bit of a loss and he had something else on his mind anyway. “Remember not to let Billy lick your dinner plates.”

 

Harry makes a strangled noise of indignation. “You let Nix do it!”

 

“That’s different,” Dick says automatically, then because there’s no plausible reason why it would be different other than the fact that Dick indulges Nix in everything, he adds, “He’s Nix’s dog.”

 

“He’s _our_ dog,” Nix mutters from behind the wheel.

 

Harry chuckles. “I am hanging up now. Don’t distract him while he’s driving.”

 

The phone beeps and Nix glances over. “What’d he want?”

 

“He called to say ‘Happy Luz’s Day.’”

 

Nix continues to look at him, assessing, before turning back to the road with a small, guarded smile that makes Dick wish he hadn’t said anything.

 

~

 

 ** _Eindhoven, Holland_** — ** _1944_**

 

Dick watches his friend’s hand slide back and forth over the metal shell of his helmet, fingers tripping over the ironically harmless-looking bullet scar.

 

He doesn’t understand how Nix can turn away from it so easily, how he doesn’t even give it a second glance as he goes to look for his cigarettes. In contrast, Dick can’t take his eyes off of it. The flame from the lighter casts flickering shadows over the flawed surface and Dick watches them dance, stubbornly refusing to see the whisper of death in the patterns they make.

 

They haven’t spoken about it. There hasn’t been time. The ghost of a near miss is still hanging heavy in the air, waiting to be put to rest.

 

“Market Garden,” Nix sighs, blowing out his first pull of smoke. “I wasn't expecting sunshine and roses, but that was a goddamn fuck up.”

 

Dick can hear him shifting, boots scuffing as he tries to get comfortable in the dirt, but Dick’s still engaged in a stand-off with the damaged M1 and won’t look away yet.

 

“And don’t say old men and kids,” Nix groans.

 

“Wasn’t going to.” In the silence, Dick finally looks up to meet brown eyes. “That was a close one, Nix.”

 

Nix doesn't pause. He doesn’t need Dick to explain what he’s referring to. “Not that close.”

 

Dick levels him with a pointed look. “Quarter of an inch.”

 

“You’re embellishing.”

 

Raising his eyebrows, he looks at Nix pointedly. “One of my most notable traits.”

 

Nix huffs a laugh. “Are you going to lecture me? Because if you are, I’ll go find some other hole to sleep in.”

 

Seeing Nix’s smile dampens the sharp _what ifs_ that play on Dick’s mind. “Yeah, well, don’t get your hopes up for a civilized response.”

 

“You know, this is why nobody likes you,” Nix teases.

 

Dick smiles into his spoonful of thinned out broth. “You seem to like me.”

 

“Nah,” Nix says, eyes suddenly bright with mischief. “That’s just a rumor started by Luz.” He winks lewdly.

 

Dick chuckles, then stops, frowns and regards Nix with serious eyes. “Really?”

 

Nix huffs a breath of amusement. “Believe it or not, I’m not friends with you just to please George Luz.”

 

“No, I mean. Do they really talk about us like that?”

 

Nix looks up slowly, dark eyes flickering over Dick’s face. “I was joking, Dick.” His voice is low, maybe even edged.

 

“Sometimes I wonder if they think that.”

 

Nix’s frame seems taut and he’s not meeting Dick’s eyes. “You’d have to ask Lip.”

 

Dick presses his lips together, wondering if he’s said something wrong because Nix looks pensive and his eyes are stormy. Maybe he’s disgusted. It’s not right, after all, to be seen as more than friends. It’s not right to like the idea.

 

A couple of minutes draw out between them, and when he braves a look up, Nix is relaxed again.

 

“Life in the paratroopers,” Nix laments, hand back on the helmet.

 

“Yeah,” Dick says automatically, watching the absent forward-back motion of Nix’s fingers. “That helmet needs replacing.”

 

Nix hefts it up, looks along the rupture and shrugs. “Still more useful than a leg bag.”

 

“I’d rather get you home in one piece than test the theory,” Dick says, forcing his eyes away to look up at the streaming sky.

 

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” comes the quick reply. Nix lets the helmet fall to the ground and slouches down the dirt wall, absently wiping over the burn graze on his temple. “Threat of imminent death,” he intones whimsically. “Wouldn’t really be us without it.”

 

Dick thinks that they’ve never really had the chance to find out.

 

“Watch yourself, Lew.”

 

He means, _Please be careful,_ but the subtle differences make the words difficult to say.

 

~

 

When they arrive at the Nixon house, Dick laughs at the indulgence of it.

 

“You do this every time we come here,” Nix smiles.

 

Not-Dick is clearly overwhelmed by opulence too. He feels his lips quirk in a secret smile and follows Nix through the front door. The house is vast, just like he’d expected, but it’s also empty when it should be occupied by two resident Nixons.

 

Dick looks over at Nix suspiciously as he chats charmingly with a cleaner and she tells him that his parents are on vacation. Nix feigns surprise but has the grace not to look Dick in the eye when he does it.

 

Dick doesn’t call him out on it. He takes the opportunity to wander around the house unwatched, and tries to put himself in Nix’s shoes before he gets too angry at the farce.

 

Later, he walks upstairs, locates the bedrooms and follows the sound of Nix’s tread. When he opens the door, there are clothes strewn out across the bed and it’s hard to imagine how everything once fitted in the case.

 

Nix jumps then freezes like guilt has a gun to his head.

 

“What are you up to, Nix?”

 

“Nothing. I just wasn’t sure you’d want to speak to me.” He looks sheepish and the last of Dick’s irritation melts away.

 

“Are you stealing your dad’s liquor?”

 

Nix smirks, relieved. “If I was, I wouldn’t have put it in _my_ suitcase.” Dick rolls his eyes, trying to keep all trace of fondness undetectable. “Act like that all you want but you’re the only one that doesn’t get stopped at the Stanhope border control.”

 

“You both think I’m naive.”

 

“We both think you’re awesome,” Nix corrects. “And that you’re trustworthy. Having said that, neither of us will ever let you drive one of our stick shifts again.” Dick’s actually shocked. He’s an excellent driver. “To be honest, if you never drive me again it will be too soon — there’s never enough upholstery to hold on to. And that’s probably the only thing my father and I agree on.”

 

“They’re not here are they?” Dick asks, unsurprised when Nix doesn’t answer. “Have you deliberately planned a trip for a day you knew they weren’t home?”

 

Dick watches Nix’s back as he walks to the window, putting a hand to the glass. The gesture reminds Dick of when he first looked out at a glistening Chicago skyline.

 

Nix looks lost when he says, “Can we talk about this later?”

 

Dick wants to say _no_ , but he just nods.

 

~

 

‘Later’ means after Nix has ordered dinner and Dick has swum in one of the Nixon bath tubs. It means after they’ve eaten, and it would seem that it also means after they’ve watched a movie, because Nix has dragged him to a room with a full color cinema screen and has cued up a film before Dick has even tried to broach the subject again.

 

“What are we watching?” he asks as he allows himself the luxury of spreading out across one of the room’s sofas. The seats are deeper than they are high and it’s tempting to fall asleep under the rug Nix has thrown over them.

 

“The first Captain America film.”

 

Dick nods although he’s none the wiser. He’s not even really sure why he bothered asking.

 

Nix regales him with a color commentary from the very first shot of an icy wasteland. It sounds practiced like it’s probably a narration that the other Dick has heard dozens of times before.

 

Hydra goons are herding around POWs when Dick has to double take. “Buck?”

 

“No, that’s the other one,” Nix says.

 

Dick frowns, sits upright. The man he’s watching is definitely Buck. “That’s Buck Compton.”

 

“I’m almost positive that’s not his name, buddy. I bet you a blowjob that you’re wrong.” Nix reaches for his phone as though it will have the answers, which it apparently does. “Nope, it’s Dugan.”

 

“We don’t know him then?”

 

Nix narrows his eyes. “No.”

 

Dick spends most of the next ten minutes tracking Buck’s moustache and gusty bravado as he wields an electrical weapon that for all Dick knows is actually something that exists.

 

Meanwhile, he tries to ignore the fact that the lead character has just given away his sergeant’s sniper position by saluting him. Who’s Dick to judge; Buck’s a Hollywood star and everything else has gone to hell too.

 

Nix’s commentary is a comforting background hum in Dick’s ears as he melts into the sofa. Minutes roll by in this state of easy ebb and flow and just when Dick starts to doze, his ears prick up at the mention of ‘homoerotic subtext’.

 

“What?”

 

“Steve and Bucky’s gay romance,” Nix replies, throwing Dick an, _Are we even watching the same movie?_ look.

 

“You think they’re… like us?”

 

“Don’t you?”

 

He knows he’s on dangerous ground here but he can’t hold back. “But it would have been illegal.”

 

“Doesn’t mean they didn’t,” Nix shrugs.

 

“Love each other or have sex?”

 

Nix looks at him intently. “Both.”

 

Dick finds himself watching the rest of the movie with new eyes and a racing heart. He’s thinking of Toccoa, a train, a troopship, England, Normandy and every other place and time since then when he could have realized that his feelings for Nix went far beyond friendship and had tiptoed over the line into love. A love that followed him on an Atlantic crossing only to grow, and he’d still pushed it back and denied it. He’s thinking of all the weighted, stolen, precious moments that now feel like wasted opportunities.

 

He swallows, squeezes his eyes shut, sucks in a breath because his head is spinning. This is why he’s here. “Glimpse,” he hears himself murmur.

 

He’d almost forgotten the solid heat of Nix’s body beside him and it both startles and calms him when Nix turns with a smile that’s beautiful and bright. “Yeah, glimpse,” he echoes. The word on his lips sounds like it means something to him. To them.

 

“When are your parents due back?”

 

“Damnit, Dick, not this again—”

 

“No,” Dick says firmly, placing a sure hand on Nix’s cheek. “I mean, how long do we have until they’re back?”

 

Before Nix can respond, before the smile can even fully slide onto his face, Dick leans in and presses their lips together.

 

This Nix has kissed him hundreds of times. He probably doesn’t feel the snaps of static that spark around them like Dick does — one for every missed kiss. He probably doesn’t feel a delicious and unexpected twist of desire in his belly, or a fever of thrills down his spine. Dick does, and it would almost overwhelm him, but for the fact that he knows what he wants now and he’s got tunnel vision.

 

He strokes the cheek under his palm, feels stubble rasping his fingertips, strokes because he wants to touch and because it anchors him to the world when joy and lust threaten explosions.

 

But this gentle, closed mouthed kiss is like pulling a pin from a grenade; it’s hungry and longing, it won’t be satisfied until it inevitably spirals into more, and when he parts his mouth so Nix can slip his tongue inside, it does.

 

Nix moans into his mouth, surges forward and around so that he’s straddling Dick’s lap, whining in the back of his throat when Dick pushes their bodies into contact with a hand on the small of his back.

 

Nix mutters curses against his lips and spreads his knees wider so he has more leverage to grind down. His tongue is dipping into the hollow at the base of Dick’s throat, once, twice, then he’s working upwards to flick at Dick’s racing pulse.

 

Screwing his eyes shut, Dick arches up into the heat and strength of Nix’s body and by the time he forces his eyes open again, Nix is looking down at him with hooded eyes, brown rapidly disappearing under an eclipse of black.

 

Dick gasps, lets slip a moan. God, he can actually feel Nix’s cock hardening against his stomach.

 

He jolts when Nix’s teeth sink into his lower lip with a sharp nip, and growls, “Come on.” It’s not quite an angry dare, but it’s not completely playful either. It’s edged and it makes Dick’s blood hot and his hands tighten on Nix’s hips.

 

The room is filled with the moans Nix makes, and the shocked little gasps when they rock just right or when Dick slides a hand down to stroke Nix through his pants. It’s like touching himself, but without the direct physical pleasure and somehow it’s better, the best he’s ever felt.

 

“God, Dick,” Nix chokes out through a moan, bracing his hands behind himself on Dick’s thighs. He lets his head tip back and rolls his hips so their cocks rub together through layers of fabric. “Fuck, I’ve missed you.”

 

The practiced circling of Nix’s hips is so, so good, but the words are like ice in Dick’s veins, a chink in the glass, cracking out.

 

Dick bites his lip to snuff out the apologies and explanations before they set the moment to ruin, and drags Nix down for a kiss instead, hand curling around the back of his neck, fingers splaying in his hair and licking into his mouth, hard and demanding.

 

When they break for breath, Nix rests his forehead against Dick’s and carries on rolling.

 

“Yes, unh, that’s so good,” he gasps against Dick’s lips. “What the hell’s been going on with you, huh?”

 

Dick can’t help the little whimper he makes, the sliver of pain and guilt that’s pulled from his body and punches the air from his lungs. It’s a noise that articulates horror, because Nix knows something’s wrong — of course he knows — and also heartbreak, because Nix has shoved it all aside because he loves him.

 

“It’s okay,” Nix whispers, face so close. “Don’t stop.”

 

Dick stares into eyes so black and glossy they’re like mirrors. “Lew,” he breathes. “We need to talk—”

 

Nix puts a silencing finger on Dick’s lips, frowning like there’s a stab of pain he’s trying to force to the back of his mind. “Don’t.”

 

Soft lips catch his own. It’s the sort of kiss that’s designed to tease and distract, and it works. Dick has just enough presence of mind to ask, “But do you want this?” to which Nix chokes on a burst of surprised laughter and mutters a few affirmative invectives that Dick takes to mean _yes_.

 

Impatient, Nix pulls back just enough to rip the buttons on Dick’s shirt before scraping his nails down his chest.

 

Dick arches into the feeling, decides to chase more of it. He abruptly shifts his hips to unbalance Nix before flipping him onto his back on the couch cushions.

 

“Woah, fuck, Dick.”

 

Dick almost laughs at Nix’s shocked expression but then he’s biting his lip on a cry because Nix is wrapping his legs around Dick’s waist and pulling him in. Dick groans as Nix encourages his hips in tight circles.

 

It’s not long before Dick’s thrusting, frenzied and desperate, and he knows it would be better if he got them out of their slacks but this is too good to give up. There are raw jolts of bliss that start low in his belly and spark out, sensation hot wiring through his nerves, and there’s no way Dick’s going to stop thrusting long enough to take off clothes, especially when Nix has one hand clenched in the remains of his shirt and the other teasing and rubbing Dick’s chest, rolling a nipple between thumb and forefinger.

 

Dick doesn’t know how Nix has the brain capacity to do all of this at once, because his own rational thought is drowned in pleasure. It's all he can do to keep up the jerks of his hips, and those are mostly instinctual. But now Nix is also drawing marks on Dick’s collarbone, a mixture of eager needy suction and teeth scraping over skin.

 

In between soft pants against Dick’s neck, Nix barks a sudden, amazed laugh. “We’re dry humping,” he says, pausing between the words, adding his own periods as though it’s amusing and amazing and intensely hot, and he just has to say it out loud.

 

“Quiet, Lew,” Dick orders with a smile, pushing him back into the cushions. Nix’s mouth slams shut with a clack of teeth, silencing himself with wide eyes, but his body’s screaming and from what Dick can translate, it's chanting, _yes, fuck yes._

 

In response, Dick’s uttering Nix’s name, over and over, and he's never heard his own voice sound like that before.

 

The air is musky and hot, and Nix is shaking under him, his upward thrusts starting to slow and falter at the same rate his pretty little whines and moans amplify.

 

“Feels so good,” Nix chokes out. “I’m gonna come like this if you don’t stop.”

 

“Lew, please… God, you’re so beautiful. I've never loved anyone like you, Nix,” Dick feels like the words have been ripped out of him, but he means every single one of them. Different place and different time, but this Nix, his Nix, they're one and the same, and now he can pinpoint all of the emotions he’s never been able to put a name to before.

 

Nix whines and sucks in a breath. Dick’s vision focuses just in time to see his hands scrabble across the pillows above his head and his frame pull taut, muscles bunching as he comes with a tremble that sparks its way down his body. Dick can _feel_ it, it vibrates through every contact point. Every firm line, soft curve, and in some other less tangible way that feels infinitely deeper.

 

He watches, awestruck, as Nix tips his head back and quivers as the aftershocks pitch through him.

 

It feels like every cell of Dick’s body is pulsing with Nix’s orgasm so when he’s pulled down by his own just seconds later, he's stunned. The waves of it snap then melt his spine, draw him out and leave him floating.

 

Through the haze, he can feel Nix’s rough, sated chuckle in his bones.

 

“We haven’t done that for…” Nix pauses. **“** You know, I don’t think we’ve ever done that.”

 

Dick bites his lip because he knows that Nix is right in more ways than he realizes. Meanwhile, Nix is squeezing his hold across Dick’s back, reluctant to let even the slightest slip of air or shadow between them.

 

“Think we must’ve bypassed it and gone straight to the hard stuff,” Nix continues. “Boy, were we wrong.” He pulls Dick down for a lazy kiss. “You good?”

 

The answer is a simple _yes_ and also _so much_ , but he nuzzles Nix’s nose in silence. The thing is that all this good was never intended for him. It’s so good that it’s shooting round a figure eight back to awful again. This Nix loves the Dick that had the courage to know what he wanted and was brave enough to take it.

 

He feels a sting in his eyes and a burning in his throat and tries to cover it by breaching the tiny gap between them and stealing another kiss. And that’s just what he’s doing: stealing, because this Nix’s kisses don’t belong to him.

 

There’s a flush on Nix’s cheeks and down his neck and across what’s visible of his collarbones. It reminds Dick of the times Nix had stumbled back to quarters, hair tugged loose of pomade and running warm off the back of a tumble with an unnamed girl. Dick aches with want, but the Nix of his world doesn’t belong to him either. But he loves him. God, does he love him.

 

“Dick?” Nix prompts, the word a feather like caress on Dick’s lips.

 

It’s been so long, Dick could almost have forgotten the question, only it’s ringing over and over in his ears. “Yeah, good,” he assures Nix eventually. “Perfect.” Lies layered on more lies.

 

Dick feels empty, and then he feels ungrateful. He should just be happy with this moment. He was put here for a reason, he’s allowed to have this, and yet the guilt is a fuzzy blur at the edges of every line in the sand, especially the ones he shares with Nix. His mouth is suddenly dry.

 

“I’ll get water,” he says, gently pulling himself out of Nix’s hold.

 

“And a towel.”

 

“I meant to drink.” He looks down at himself, feeling sticky and disgusting in his underwear. “I think we’re going to need a shower not a sponge bath.”

 

“Pfff.”

 

Dick laughs despite himself. “I’m going to ignore that.”

 

~

 

The bathroom, when he stumbles across it, doesn’t look like a bathroom anymore. It looks like the inside of a tent, one that Dick has already been in. So it comes as no surprise when First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan turns to him from a map that’s spread out where the basin ought to be.

 

It’s all so realistic, it could almost be true. Or at the very least, it might reasonably be one of his memory dreams. It makes him feel like Meehan’s lieutenant again.

 

“Am I going back, sir?”

 

“Do you want to?”

 

Dick sighs. Meehan drops his pencil on the map and sighs in sympathy.

 

“Does it matter?”

 

Meehan casually looks him up and down, taking in the finger trails in his hair, the hickeys on his neck, his destroyed shirt, and raises an eyebrow. Dick defiantly refuses to look down to see if there’s a wet patch on his pants.

 

“It matters,” Meehan concludes.

 

Dick drags in a long pull of air. “I need to go back, back to France. I have a job to do. And I need…”

 

“...Yes?”

 

“Nix,” he finishes. “Wasn’t that the point of all this? To know what I’m missing? Please just send me back and I can see if there’s a chance. This Nix needs his own version of me.”

 

A quick smile dimples Meehan’s cheeks.

 

“So… am I going back right now? Or can I say goodbye first?”

 

“There’s something else you need to do here. Think of it as an extra assignment.”

 

“For whose benefit?”

 

Just when Dick starts to balk at the idea of being a piece in whatever game this is, Meehan smiles knowingly.

 

“His.”

 

Dick can’t hold his gaze anymore. His eyes trace over the map of Europe, compass arc already marked, and doesn’t look up when Meehan starts talking again.

 

“You can do some good here.”

 

Dick would like to think so, he really would, but every move he makes seems to make things worse. He can’t conceive of any way he could make this world better. And this is the second time a ghost has let slip that he has to do something to settle a score, to recreate a balance.

“So I’m really here to help, not to learn.”

 

Blue eyes look up at him from under fair eyelashes, vibrant even in death. “Fucked if I know.”

 

“You do though,” Dick insists.

 

“If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say both.” He tilts his head. “You’re smart, Dick. It won’t be long now.”

 

“And this world’s Dick? Where’s he?” He’s thought about this a lot. Is Nix looking after him? Stopping him from doing something to land himself with a court martial? Or worse, is someone taking a bullet to stop him from getting himself killed?

 

“He’s sleeping,” Meehan answers neutrally.

 

“Sleeping?”

 

Dick receives a fresh, lopsided smile in reply. “Close enough to sleeping.” His expression darkens a little. “Dick, can I give you some advice? When you’re back, take your chance. Not many people get the opportunity to act on what ifs.”

 

Dick looks at Meehan afresh. A young, charming, clever man who never got to live his best years, and Dick’s mind wonders about the nature of Meehan’s what ifs.

 

A notion clicks, and Dick stands very still, regards Meehan and asks, “Different stick?”

 

Meehan smiles sadly. “Different stick.”

 

Then he’s disappearing, and so’s the tent, and Dick numbly grabs a towel, dampens it and retraces his steps, unthinking.

 

Nix is asleep, sprawled across the length of the enormous sofa just where Dick had left him. He drops the towel onto the floor and curls up alongside, hoping that Nix’s heat will push out all other thought.

 

He doesn’t have a nightmare that night, even though he thinks he probably deserves one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes dub-con which relates to a sexual situation between canon!Dick and AU!Nix. Both parties consent but AU!Nix doesn’t realize Dick is from a different universe.


	7. Recoil

The next morning, Dick wakes to an empty cinema room. It’s late, far later than he usually gets up, and even in half sleep, he’s reaching out for Nix.

 

The sofa cushions are cold, the material that felt so velvety smooth last night scratches his palm. The realness of it scrubs his mind clear of grogginess, allows the images of the night before to slip back to the front of his mind, slotting into time, and it’s far from the scary, heart stopping moment of remembrance and regret that it might have been. Dick doesn’t balk; he smiles.

 

There’s no sign of Nix as he gets clean clothes from his suitcase and goes to shower, but the house is so big that he’s not that surprised. Fresh from the bathroom, he makes his way through the house with a bounce in his step.

 

There are so many reasons why this streak of honeyed joy should be smothered by slow, dark as treacle hopelessness, but the memory of falling asleep with Nix in his arms lightens his footsteps.

 

Walking past the kitchen, a voice cuts through his thoughts. “I didn’t expect you to still be here.”

 

Dick turns to find the housemaid from yesterday standing behind him. He smiles, but her words have startled him. “Where else would I be?”

 

His voice isn’t as casual as he’d like. He’s never casual when he hears a question like that here. Anything that suggests he’s doing or not doing something Not-Dick would or wouldn’t do cinches his lungs.

 

“I thought you’d be out with Lewis,” she says. “On a date.”

 

“Oh.”

 

She squints as though she feels that Dick’s face isn’t showing the required level of recognition. “It’s Luz’s Day.”

 

With a quick look around to check that Nix isn’t in earshot, he turns to her with a wide-eyed plea. “Yes, but what _is_ that exactly?”

 

The girl’s smile drops, eyebrows drawing together. “It’s your anniversary, sir.”

 

Dick groans. Of all the times he could have slipped into this life, it had to be now, over an anniversary he could never hope to know about. Pain zips through his front teeth before he realizes he’s grinding them together. Surely one of his ghostly guides could have thought to mention this.

 

Frustration quickly makes way for concern as the girl continues to look at him warily. Dick knows he needs to focus on finding Nix and putting this right. “Do you know where he is?”

 

“Down by the lake, I'd guess,” she answers, clearly still very confused.

 

“Thank you.” He pauses just long enough as he says it to be considered polite, then turns and rushes out of the house.

 

Outside, Dick squints against the morning sunlight. It’s blinding, washing the world with white, like the day itself is an overexposed photograph. Or a dream.

 

He’s relieved when he spots Nix by the edge of the lake, looking out across the shimmering water. He looks still and calm, soft where the light kisses the tips of his hair and glances over the fibers of his coat. But as he hears Dick approach, the length of his body stiffens.

 

“It’s only me,” Dick says quietly, pausing until Nix relaxes and turns.

 

Only, he doesn’t turn. And his frame doesn’t relax. “I know,” Nix replies, voice flat and cold.

 

Contentment drains out of Dick so quickly, he doesn’t know if it was ever there in the first place.

The edges of Nix’s silhouette seem sharper, clearer, and the morning doesn’t feel much like a dream anymore. It feels as real and raw as the knots that tug in his stomach, tightening yet again as Nix slowly turns with a perfectly blank expression that he’s not sure he’s ever seen before.

 

Dick’s _Happy Anniversary_ greeting disintegrates on his tongue. “Nix—”

 

“Give me your hand.”

 

“I—Nix, why?”

 

“Give me,” Nix reiterates slowly, “your hand.”

 

Dick stares at him in horror. There’s a flood of fear crackling its way down his spine, leaving him cold. He knows precisely why Nix is asking this.

 

He’s subconsciously stepping back, pulling his hands behind himself, when Nix intercepts by wrapping his fingers around Dick’s right wrist.

 

They’re both silent, so silent Dick imagines he can hear the ice on the lake splinter under an imaginary pressure, then Nix turns Dick’s hand over in his, pushes the sweater up and watches his own fingers play across the tendons and skin of Dick’s inner wrist.

 

It’s obvious what Nix is doing. His fingertips are tripping over Dick’s pulse, looping, tapping, pausing, and there’s no doubt in Dick’s mind that there’s a code in there somewhere. Everywhere. And when Nix looks up to see Dick’s nonplussed expression — desperate to understand but completely uncomprehending — his eyes glisten with brimming tears.

 

“Nix, I have to talk to you.”

 

Nix’s humorless bark of laughter scrapes over raw nerves. “No kidding.” He lets Dick’s wrist drop.

 

It's terrifying, this cool, flinty look on Nix’s face. It hurts to know that his presence is making this man’s world crumble around him, pulling at the seams of his heart with no way of knowing how to sew him back together.

 

“Lew, please,” Dick says desperately. “He loves you, please don’t—”

 

Nix scowls. “Who does? What the hell are you talking about?”

 

Dick inhales deeply. “Can we sit?”

 

“No. Out with it,” Nix snaps in a low voice.

 

“I’m not the person you think I am.” Nix scoffs and Dick’s forced to race ahead for fear of watching Nix walk away. “We didn’t meet at college. I’m not a teacher. I’d never seen Kitty at all before a few days ago.”

 

Nix stares at him with mouth hanging open.

 

“We didn't decorate your apartment together. We’d never kissed before—”

 

“Dick,” Nix gasps. “Don’t.”

 

“Please hear me out. I haven’t finished.” He takes a step closer, tries not to wince when Nix steps back almost twice the distance. “I _am_ Richard Winters, but I’m not the one you know. Last week I fell asleep in Europe, in 1945, in the middle of a war against Nazi Germany. No, wait! Please listen. I’m a paratrooper, and I know you, I’ve known you for years, but not this version of you—”

 

“Stop.”

 

Dick stutters to a halt but in his desperation his voice doesn’t obey for long. “Nix, I—”

 

“God, Dick, just stop!”

 

Nix turns his back and Dick draws in air that feels no richer in oxygen than the breath he’s just pushed out.

 

He wants to redact every word and start over, but Nix has asked only this one thing of him and it’s the least he can do to give him some time.

 

So he waits, and watches the lake glowing in front of them, ice throwing the sun back like it resents its intent to thaw. Its brightness burns Dick’s eyes and maybe some of his ill-founded hope too.

 

Nix looks firm in his silence so when he finally speaks, voice surprisingly even, it takes Dick by surprise. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”

 

Dick can’t help but agree in his own way. He’s still kicking himself for his erratic, knee-jerk speech. “Me either,” he sighs. “I’m not telling the story right. I know this sounds insane.”

 

“And yet it’s still the most convincing thing you’ve said for days,” Nix responds blankly. “I thought you were going to say it’s over. That you’re leaving.”

 

“Leaving?”

 

“Me.” There are wet tracks on Nix’s face. Diamond tears, rough and smooth, prisms of early morning sunshine on his cheeks.

 

“What? No of course not! I can’t believe I’ve messed this up so badly.”

 

Nix cracks a miserable laugh. “It’s not your fault.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Nix sets his lips in a thin line and ignores the question.

 

“I thought you’d say I was crazy,” Dick admits when it’s obvious Nix isn’t going to answer him.

 

“Maybe I’m the one that’s crazy, but I’d rather believe that you’re from a parallel universe than accept that my boyfriend has forgotten every memory we’ve shared together.”

 

“I’m telling the truth. I swear to God.” Dick feels like he should say more, but it’s hard to find the words when Nix looks instantly pained and hopeful all at once.

 

They just watch each other for a while, Dick relieved that Nix is even glancing in his general direction, Nix assessing and pensive. Eventually, when Nix has scrutinized every inch of him from top to bottom, spending time staring at Dick’s brow like he can read Dick’s soul, he blinks and it’s like a subtle shrug. 

 

Concerned eyes rake over Dick’s arms in his thin sweater. “You’re cold. Let’s go to the summer house.”

 

This time, Nix knows that Dick has no idea where they’re going so he doesn’t have to pretend that he’s not trailing in his wake. The freedom from the pretense throws weight off his shoulders.

 

When they arrive at a large wooden building, Nix opens the glass doors and immediately fires up a heater. They sit on louver couches, and while the room warms, Nix gingerly takes one of Dick’s hands and pulls it into his coat pocket. He’s a little flushed, like he doesn’t know what to do with this new Dick that’s a stranger and his soulmate all at once. He clears his throat and says, “I have no idea why I'm not freaking out.”

 

Dick had been thinking pretty much the same thing, but he presses the tip of his tongue against the back of his teeth to keep from saying something that might tempt fate.

 

“Guess I never could leave you,” Nix says quietly.

 

It's sad and lovely all at once and Dick wants to pull him in, thank him for the fact that he hasn't bolted. Thank him like he wants to thank his own Nix too, for staying all the times he should have left, and the one time in a frozen forest of blood when Dick tried to push him away.

 

He wants to thank him so much but he’s worried the words will land like a jinx. Instead, he takes in what he can see of Nix’s downturned face and whispers, “I'm glad you didn't.”

 

“It's not like I've ever wanted to go.” Nix shrugs and looks up to meet Dick’s eyes. “So… you’re not a teacher.”

 

Nix deserves the truth and Dick doesn't have the heart to sugar coat it. “No. I’m a battalion commander.”

 

Nix presses his lips together, nods slowly. “In World War II?” His voice is carefully serious but Dick can see he’s trying to get his head around all this.

 

“That’s right,” Dick says quietly and so gently it sounds like he thinks Nix might run.

 

Nix doesn't run, but he does freeze suddenly, a violent thought seems to knock the air from his lungs. Dick can see it in the gasp of breath and urgent focus of his eyes.

 

“Where’s Dick?” he says sharply. “Is he in danger?”

 

“He’s safe,” Dick assures him quickly, squeezing his hand inside the soft lining of his coat. “He’s in some sort of… I don’t know… stasis, maybe?”

 

The tension that leaves Nix’s body puts a relieved sigh in its place. “So he’s idle somewhere,” Nix comments after a few moments. “Jesus, he’ll hate that even more.”

 

The words shock a laugh out of Dick. “Yeah,” he agrees.

 

“Well, good. He teaches European History, he’s not supposed to be part of it. Why the hell has this happened?” After a second's delay, Nix tacks on, “We’ll leave the question of how for later.”

 

“I was told that I was here to learn something, to see what I’m missing. What I could have if I took a different path. I don’t know, it’s all so surreal.”

 

Nix nods slowly. “So, what have you learnt?”

 

“That I love him,” Dick says without hesitation. “You. Lewis Nixon the third, in any incarnation.” He smiles. “I think I always knew it.”

 

Nix jams his other hand in his pocket as though he’s trying to keep from reaching out. “You and the me in your world… you’re not together?”

 

Dick knows what he’s asking, but he can’t push the answer past his lips. They tighten his throat. So he just says, “We’re friends.”

 

“But you’re not lovers?”

 

“No,” he sighs. “And yes, I want to be.” His voice is full of emotion, like he could breathe life into the wish if his tone is earnest enough.

 

“And him?”

 

“If he wanted me then he’d tell me.” Nix looks at him like he’s insane, and it makes Dick laugh. It’s the face he thought he’d see after his parallel universe revelation, not this. “You took the first step here.”

 

“Technically, George Luz took the first step here.”

 

Dick blinks at him and Nix smiles, a tender smile, the kind you use when you relive the best of memories.

 

“He did your voice on the phone. He’s umm… good at impersonating people.” Nix trails off with a little chuckle when he sees Dick’s face. “You know a Luz too, huh? Anyway, he somehow tricked me into confessing that I wanted you. You were in the next room and could hear every word. He takes great pride in the fact he kicked our asses into gear.”

 

“I bet,” Dick says, caught up in Nix’s laugh.

 

Nix casts Dick a look. “He’s a little shit.” Dick smiles because he says it in the way you might call someone a dearest friend. “You must have been confused as fuck when everyone was going on about Luz’s Day.”

 

Nix looks bruised and Dick flinches as he remembers the blank way in which he’d delivered Harry’s anniversary greeting in the car.

 

“The anniversary. Lew, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I—your Dick wouldn’t have forgotten.”

 

To his shock, Nix looks at him skeptically. “He wouldn’t have forgotten, but I don’t know whether he would have wanted to celebrate.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“He…” Nix stops himself and doesn’t continue for a long moment, so long that Dick knows he’s committed to his silence. Maybe it’s as hard for him as it is for Dick to talk about the things they keep in little pocketbooks full of unpenned worries, secretly tucked away in the far reaches of their hearts.

 

He wants to draw him out of his silence, but he knows enough about Nix not to press him. Instead he says the only thing he still believes is true. “He loves you.” It’s probably the easiest promise he’s ever made.

 

Nix tenses. “Not enough to marry me.”

 

Dick’s eyes snap up to him in shock. So, this Nix thought that Not-Dick was going to leave him, and whichever way Dick looks at it, his behavior since arriving in this life has only cemented that belief.

 

Nix toys with the edge of his coat, pulling at loose threads. The tremble in his hand vibrates through Dick’s skin too.

 

“Eight years. Ron and Car have been engaged for almost a year, the wedding’s coming up. Harry and Kitty are married. I know I shouldn’t compare our life to theirs, but I thought Dick and I were it, you know? Every time I mention getting married, he freaks out.” Nix stops to breathe, continues tugging at frayed stitching. “Well, not ‘freak out’… Dick doesn’t really do that. I guess you know that. But the opposite isn’t true either. Silently retreats, would be more accurate.”

 

“You mean,” Dick starts, hit by a sudden flash of memory, an air bubble racing to the surface, “You’re not engaged?”

 

“Rub it in, Dick.”

 

“But…” He’s thinking of the bedside cabinet he’d rifled through on the first morning and has been using to keep his work notes in ever since. He’s remembering a box he’d opened and promptly closed without thinking because it wasn’t a ticket back to 1945. A box with two rings.

 

He takes Nix’s hand. “When you get back to Chicago, look in his bedside table, top drawer.”

 

Nix looks at him curiously. “Why? You not planning on coming with me then?”

 

“I’m not really sure what's going to happen with me from one minute to the next,” Dick says reluctantly. “But whatever happens, you should know he loves you and he wants to be with you...”

 

A quirk of a smile flashes onto Nix’s lips. “If I ask you what’s in that drawer will the world collapse? A butterfly effect kinda deal?”

 

“I don’t know what that means,” Dick responds. It feels good to admit it and Nix smiles, soft and sympathetic. “I think you know what you’ll find.” Dick adds.

 

Nix is still looking cautious and a little guarded but there’s hope and happiness there too. “Thank you,” he says as the light shifts across his face in a joyful glimmer.

 

Nix’s smile gets so bright that Dick has to look back out at the lake where somehow the blinding sun seems less powerful. Under the heat, the lake shimmers, iridescent, and Dick thinks he knows how it feels.

 

“Don't thank me,” he smiles. “I'm not the Dick Winters that picked them. And I'm pretty sure he must have raided your trust fund for them.”

 

Nix snorts with amusement and nudges Dick with his whole body. “Best use for it.”

 

“The box was really heavy,” Dick teases. “Lots of gold in there.”

 

“Didn't make ‘em like that in your day,” Nix banters back with a mischievous look.

 

Dick rolls his eyes because if he doesn't he might react completely differently. Like drag Nix into a kiss, for example.

 

“Everything is so different,” Dick says as Nix shifts slightly closer to him; he was feeling melancholy but that tiny movement has him buzzing.

 

“What happened?”

 

“I thought I was dreaming. I saw an old friend… a _dead_ friend.” He shakes his head. “He warned me that something like this was going to happen… in the vaguest possible terms. Then I just woke up one morning and I was here.” He suddenly can't look Nix in the eye. “Next to you.”

 

Nix scrutinizes him, reads his blush and sniggers. “Oh, wow. Quite the awakening.”

 

Dick clears his throat. “Just a bit.”

 

He keeps his eyes trained on the wall opposite and hopes that if he's not looking at him then Nix won't know that his thoughts have taken a merry journey to the events of the night before.

 

Worn oak doesn't stop him remembering glazed, lust-filled eyes, the sensation of eager lips under his, or the ever present hit of self-loathing that joins forces with his guilt. “I’m sorry, I—I should have said something before… before last night, I—”

 

“Oh Christ, here we go.”

 

Dick darts a hasty look Nix’s way only to find him grinning. “What?”

 

“Nothing,” Nix says, “I was just wondering when we’d get to the misplaced guilt part of the conversation.” He waves Dick off when he goes to interrupt. “Let’s get this out the way real fast. You should have said something earlier, I should have challenged you sooner, we’re both idiots and it turns out that frotting is amazing.” He grins wider. “Don’t ruin it.”

 

Dick laughs and blushes and groans somehow simultaneously.

 

“When did you wake up here?”

 

Dick’s considering the time frame — he’d started to lose track when he’d begun to feel happy, comfortable and domestic — then Nix’s expression suddenly turns to understanding.

 

“Was it the day of the three hour walk?” Dick’s wince must be all the answer Nix needs. “You were lucky you didn’t get frostbite or something.”

 

Dick shrugs, still self-deprecating as he defends himself by saying, “I’ve been colder for longer.” Well, it’s true, but he’s burning to change the subject because he hates the memory of Bastogne and Nix’s lips all chapped and blue. “Do I get to ask you a question now? Why are we spending our anniversary at your parents’ house?”

 

He doesn't correct himself, even though ‘we’ isn't strictly speaking correct. He’s seen enough, felt enough, to know that the parallel versions of themselves are precisely that: mirrors, just in a different place and time.

 

Nix’s laugh sounds hollow. “It just happens to be a good time to avoid my parents, which means a big tick against the mandatory home visit, plus we don’t have to deal with my father asking when we're going to get married.” Although he can tell Nix is looking to sandwich this reason amongst others, Dick knows straight away that this is the crux of it.” And telling us that Lord knows we better not be planning to elope because there are important people that need to be invited. And my mother won’t make you play chess. I know you secretly like that, by the way.” He looks up quickly. “Well, maybe not… you.”

 

“I like chess.”

 

Nix chuckles, a rich sound that trickles into his eyes. After a short while of companionable quiet, he asks, “What’s your Nix like?”

 

Dick quirks a soft smile. “Just like you.”

 

“Well, that fits. If it weren’t for everything you don’t know about our life, you’re _him._ It’s what makes it so easy to believe you. I can’t imagine a world where I wouldn’t love you.” He pauses, eyes tracking Dick’s face. Dick wonders if he can see the hope that’s seeping into his mind and fizzing through his bloodstream. “Does he know?”

 

Dick shrugs like he’s not sure, but it feels like a shake of the head, a _no_ yelled at full voice.

 

“You haven’t told him,” Nix concludes, used to taking cues from the other Dick’s body language. “Do you usually look at him the way you look at me?”

 

“I guess.”

 

Nix nods thoughtfully. He narrows his eyes the way all Nixes seem to do before they say something Dick won't want to hear. “In that case, he probably knows.”

 

Dick blinks at him, mind analyzing Nix’s response from every angle. Could he know? Was it possible that he knew but hadn’t said anything?

 

A breath-stealing thought gatecrashes his mind and suddenly the possibilities feel like sharp needles not the opening doors he wants them to be. “He umm… he actually has a wife and child,” he murmurs, wincing when the words hurt just as much out loud as they did in his head. “I’d almost forgotten.”

 

“I’d bet you anything that he’s forgotten too,” Nix says smoothly.

 

Caught in the crossfire of fear and hope, Dick doesn't know what to say. Fortunately Nix changes the subject. “Is he a battalion commander too?”

 

“He’s an intelligence officer.”

 

“That sounds impressive. Just when I thought I couldn’t be jealous.”

 

Dick smiles. “If it helps, he had Sobel for a boss too. Before we jumped into Normandy. He was our superior.”

 

Nix doesn’t balk over the mention of Normandy like Dick thought he might, instead he chuckles and echoes, “Superior,” in amusement.

 

They sit quietly for a few minutes and Dick soaks in the warmth of Nix’s hand in his.

 

“There’s something that doesn’t make sense though,” Nix says thoughtfully, sending Dick a playful glare when he scoffs at the understatement. “Something that makes even less sense than everything else,” he corrects. “You said ‘glimpse.’ How did you know about that?”

 

“That’s what I was told. Before I woke up here. Does it mean something?”

 

“It’s what we said to each other… a promise. After the thing with Luz we agreed to go on a date, but we were both scared that changing things might break our friendship so we called the date a glimpse. A glimpse of a different future. And if things didn’t feel right, it was just a glimpse and we’d keep things as they were. And if they did, well…”

 

Nix’s grin is infectious but Dick can’t stop the creeping sadness. He’s not sure if he can really allow himself to believe that he could have this with his own Nix. He sighs. “He said we’d go to Chicago when the war ends.”

And that’s the thing. It’s not just Not-Nix that’s been worried about what the future holds, silently hoping that Not-Dick isn’t about to up and leave him. The quiet voice in Dick’s mind that whispers warnings about the end of the war has been getting louder with every marched step that takes them closer to victory, to safety, to a new life for every soldier that survives. For Dick, it means losing Nix.

 

“Can I kiss you?” Dick asks, squeezing Nix’s hand.

 

“No,” Nix says with a knowing smile. “If you kiss me, you won’t kiss him. Don’t be a coward.”

 

“You _are_ him,” Dick smiles despite himself.

 

Nix narrows his eyes playfully. “Are you being obtuse or divisive?”

 

“I’m offended that you'd think I'd be either.”

 

Nix’s grin freezes. “Dick,” he says oddly. “You cracked it?”

 

“Cracked what?” Confused, he tracks Nix’s eye line to where he’s pulled their joined hands out of the coat pocket and is swirling designs on the back of Nix’s fingers.

 

“Our code.”

 

Dick tenses. “No, I didn’t.”

 

His body fires with thoughts of blurred lines and lives, and feels a tug in his gut like he could be wrenched out of this body at any second. He instinctively reaches for his ankle, where Not-Dick’s smooth skin has made way for the evidence of an unlucky ricochet.

 

Nix catches his eye, glances down to where he’s rubbing his fingers over the damaged skin. “That’s weird,” he says. “Dick doesn’t have a scar on his ankle.”

 

Dick meets his eyes. “But I do.”

 

Nodding slowly, Nix quietly guesses, “You need to go lead an Allied advance or something?” and rubs a thumb over the back of Dick’s hand.

 

The moment feels urgent, the room smaller, and there’s a scratch of a pencil and the tap of a typewriter in his ear from another time, another life. Sounds that don’t belong here.

 

He can’t find the words to say he doesn’t know, doesn’t have the heart to say, _Yes, I think so,_ but in the end it’s his own shocked yelp that breaks the silence when he looks up to find Meehan standing by the glass door.

 

The ghost casually adjusts his hat, rests his hands on his hips and raises his eyebrows in an unspoken, _What are you waiting for?_

 

“Fuck!”

 

Dick rips his eyes away to take in Nix’s very pale face. “You can see him?”

 

“Yes, I can see him!” Nix exclaims, holding Dick’s hand hard enough to hurt. “But I’m more freaked that now I suddenly _can’t_.”

 

Dick frowns and snaps his eyes back to the now empty patch of air that Meehan had been standing in.

 

“He was there, right?” Nix demands. “He was there, then he disappeared.”

 

“Yes, he was definitely there.”

 

There’s a shrill, singing panic making his entire body cold. He’s not sure he’s ready for this. He hadn’t thought that he’d grow so attached to this life and the people in it. It hurts more than he thought it would to think of goodbye, and now he realizes that what he’s been pining for since he woke up here is a battlefield and the possibility of rejection by the man he loves.

 

He clenches his eyes shut, voice wavering when he asks, “What should I do? I’m going back and I don’t know what to do when I get there.”

 

Nix closes his eyes, takes some long breaths, then calmly suggests, “Never trust George Luz with a personal secret.” Dick gives him a desperately impatient look and Nix’s thumb is immediately and insistently soothing. “Just be honest.”

 

When Dick looks back to see if Meehan has reappeared, Nix continues talking. Only, a quick check reveals that his lips aren’t moving, and the smiling, familiar voice that fills the air is speaking into the wrong room. The wrong universe.

_“‘I want you all to get a full night’s sleep tonight.’”_

 

Next to him, Nix jumps. “Shit, is that...?”

 

_“‘In the morning, you will report to me that you made it across the river… into German lines… but were unable to secure any live prisoners.’”_

 

“Fuck, that’s me!”

 

Dick feels time slipping away from him. “Nix,” he says firmly, moving around to face him. He puts a hand to each of his arms, and tries to think of all the things he needs to say. “Look after yourself. Resign dramatically like you know you want to and set up on your own.” He smiles softly even though every nerve in his body feels charged and urgent. “And enjoy marriage.”

 

Nix lets out a startled, beautifully genuine laugh, and despite his earlier denial, he leans in and kisses Dick until the ground falls from under their feet.


	8. Figure 8

**_Haguenau, France_** — ** _February 1945_**

 

Haguenau is still. On the other side of the river the ground is just as frozen, ready for blood that will never spill.

 

Dick’s staring down at a battered wooden desk, light-headed and stomach heaving. He blinks spots from his eyes that look like bruises, and for a second there’s nothing but the sound of his own dragging breath, a shuddering noise like he’s been underwater until now.

 

Then other sounds become louder, clearer.

 

“Alright, Captain Winters.”

 

Then the scrape of a chair.

 

“Lights out for you. I need to go and write this up.”

 

And a tread across the floorboards.

 

At the touch of a hand, Dick looks up. He can already feel the smile play at his lips.

 

Nix throws a quick glance over his shoulder that Dick didn’t spot the first time they did this. There’s a look in his eye that Dick only now understands, and one that he hopes he’s not imagining.

 

The lamplight casts Nix in its glow and Dick wants to pull him in, feel his stubbled jaw under his palm. He wants to kiss Nix so badly in that moment that he's not sure how he restrains himself from crossing the space between them and pressing the length of their bodies together against the door.

 

Just like the first take of this scene, they’re watching each other. Nix just holds his gaze like he always does; he more than meets Dick halfway in creating that unnamed spark that flickers in the space between them.

 

Thoughts crash through Dick’s mind as he watches Nix pause at the threshold looking uncharacteristically hesitant, eyes sharp with intense emotion. Even now Dick wonders if he’s got it all wrong, if he imagined the glimpse into another life or if Not-Nix was wrong.

 

But Nix is already speaking — “I’m really proud of you, Dick” — and Dick knows that this is his chance and he’s wasting it. He's momentarily surprised that an apparition of Hoobler or Hall or Meehan isn’t there to glare at him in disbelief, but he doesn't need them to tell him that if he lets Nix leave it might be too late.

 

Dick’s heart races as Nix starts to lift his knuckles to the door frame.  It has to be now, today. Tomorrow is coming too fast.

               

“I’m proud of you too,” he blurts in a rush.

 

As soon as the words slip from his lips he’s worried that they don’t sound sincere, that it’s too little too late, but Nix’s expression is amazed and touched and his hand drops from the air.

 

Swallowing, Dick stands up and takes a step towards him. “I don’t want to say goodbye.”

 

Nix laughs under his breath. “Well, we’ve got a way to go. Don’t think Hitler’s going to call it quits just yet.”

 

“No, I mean…” He takes a breath, meets Nix’s confused look head on. “I mean that I don’t want to say good _night_.”

 

Nix stops still, mouth dropping open slightly in surprise.

 

Dick waits as dark eyes study him carefully. If Nix doesn’t feel the same it might break his heart, but if Nix doesn’t feel the same and word gets out about this, then the repercussions would be brutal and lifelong. But Dick still moves another step closer, and another, and with every step he feels more reckless because Nix looks anything but disgusted.

 

“Do you have to report back to Regiment?” Dick asks quietly.

 

Nix takes a step back into the room, eyes vibrant with nervous energy. “Not if you need me here.”

 

Dick lets the automatic _yes_ dissolve on his tongue because there’s another verb that will make his intentions clearer and it’s too late to be coy now anyway. He takes a deep breath, and says, “I _want_ you here.”

 

“You—?”

 

“That rumor about us…”

 

Nix blinks. “Luz’s rumor?”

 

“That’s the one. Does it bother you?”

 

“No,” Nix replies carefully. “Does it bother _you_?”

 

Dick’s voice is quiet but sure when he shakes his head and says, “No.”

 

They’re so close now, Dick would just have to lift his hand to touch; he wouldn’t even have to extend his arm. He takes in Nix’s face, trails the distance from eyes to lips so he can follow the cupid bow swoop of them.

 

“Not being bothered by it and wanting it are very different,” Nix murmurs breathlessly, pupils dilating fast.

 

“Sometimes,” Dick agrees, dragging his gaze back up to meet darkening eyes. “Not in this case though.”

 

Nix’s breath hitches, so quietly that Dick might not have heard it but for their nearness and the rise of his chest that almost takes him into Dick’s space.

 

Dick takes a breath of his own, long and deep like he could breathe Nix in. On the exhale, he slowly curls a hand around Nix’s bicep, squeezes gently over his jacket, and closes the last of the gap so they’re toe to toe, cheeks a whisper from touching.

 

Looking back, he can’t understand how it wasn’t obvious that he was in love with Nix before. So deeply it might be etched into his bones and so blatant it could be stamped on his dog tags for all to see. He may not have realized it before now, but he's been carrying this torch for far too long and Nix deserves to know. “Please don’t run…” he whispers.

 

“What?” The word sends a soft flutter of warm air over Dick’s cheek.

 

“... I love you.”

 

“Dick.” There’s choked need in Nix’s voice but Dick still gives him time to retreat as he dips his head, nuzzles along his jaw with a barely there brush of his nose, and tenderly presses a kiss to Nix’s neck.

 

Nix whines softly, voice rasping when he shakily asks, “Have you been at my whiskey?”

 

The words are an echo from a shared bedroom in Chicago and it makes Dick huff a laugh into Nix’s neck. He pulls his head up to meet hungry brown eyes, eyelashes butterflying against Nix’s cheek en route.

 

“No. It’s just me.” With shivers running up his spine, he places another kiss to the same spot on Nix’s neck, and lets his tongue taste salt and soap.

 

Nix smiles, continues smiling as he narrows his eyes in suspicion and disbelief. “This is real?”

 

“If you want it to be.”

 

Nix purses his lips in amusement, eyes drawing across Dick’s face reverently. He closes the gap between them and whispers a low, growling, “Yes.”

 

Dick lets him thread a hand through his hair and shudders in delight as Nix widens his stance, bringing them flush together with a scratch of jacket fabric and a clink of belts. He swears he can hear Nix’s heart rate rattle up a notch.

 

When Nix leans in and their lips connect, Dick can’t understand how this has never happened before. But Nix is kissing him as though he thinks Dick will disappear if he really starts to believe he’s actually there, in the flesh, matching him kiss for kiss.

 

“I’m here, Nix,” he whispers between kisses against Nix’s lips.

 

“If it’s not whiskey,” Nix whispers back, “care to tell me what’s brought this on?”

 

Dick gently rubs his jaw against the bristle of Nix’s scruff and breathes him in. It would be easier to say what he needs to say with his eyes closed, face nuzzled in the softness of Nix shoulder, but he doesn't need to hide from Nix.

 

He leans back just enough to lock eyes. Sees trust and loyalty and love. “Remember when you said that I’m honest? And that you like that I'm honest?”

 

“Repetition of the word, ‘honest,’” Nix says with an amused smile. _“_ You preparing me for something? Laying the groundwork for a shocking reveal?”

 

Dick reels him back in, holding tight as though without Nix’s touch sheer happiness might shake him apart. “Do you remember?” he prompts.

 

“Yes, Dick. I remember.”

 

“Well you might want to bear that in mind while I’m telling you this story.”

 

“Christ, how shocking _is_ it?” Nix asks with delight and Dick rolls his eyes. “Okay, I’m all ears. Where do we start?”

 

“In a bed.”

 

Nix raises his eyebrows and the sound of his laughter brings a blush to Dick’s cheeks. Their smiles touch.

 

“Not that I'm complaining, but I was actually asking where the story starts.”

 

“Well, the story starts in a bed.”

 

“Then for authenticity we really should go find the nearest bed,” he smirks, pulling Dick by the hand. “Does the story have a name? Every good story has a name.”

 

“Glimpse.”

 

Nix tilts his head, considering. “Glimpse?”

 

“Yeah,” Dick smiles.

 

“Alright then, let’s glimpse.”

 

~

 

The next morning, they move off the line. Outside, the river’s moving fast with the swell of the tide and the dirt glints like fine sand under Dick’s feet.

 

He moves through the mass of soldiers and vehicles that Speirs predictably has under complete control. Sparked by curiosity, Dick looks for Ron in the crowd. He finds him stood in a doorway, head tilted towards Lipton. Dick wouldn't normally think anything of the way Ron’s hand flexes restlessly near Lip’s arm, but this time he smiles to himself.

 

Harry collars him briefly to ask him a question and all the while he enjoys the sensation of Nix’s eyes on him. After a night of whispered confessions, he knows now that that gaze means love. That while he’s been too blind to notice and too naive to hope, it always has.

 

“What were Harry’s kids like?” Nix asks as Harry moves on.

 

“Awesome.”

 

Nix raises his eyebrows, tries and fails to hold back a surprised laugh. “Sounds like I would have liked them. Shame I won't meet them.”

 

Dick’s next words are fuelled by instinct. “I guess you still might.”

 

When Nix tosses him his oak leaves, it reminds him of a box with two rings and he hopes their owners are happy. And when he volunteers to drive, a memory from another life makes him look for Nix’s surreptitious little wince.

 

“I saw that,” he says as they jump in the jeep.

 

“What?”

 

“That face. I’ll have you know that I’m an excellent driver.”

 

Nix hums in sarcastic agreement and hisses when Dick crunches the car in gear. “In the spirit of honesty, my friend, you’re a shocking driver. Fortunately that’s not why I keep you around.”

 

Dick glances over to find Nix already looking. He can’t imagine there will be a day when his breath won’t catch at the sight, that there’ll be a time when he won’t be thankful for a ghost and a glimpse.

 

Nix’s lips curl into a happy grin and Dick doesn't have to see his reflection to know that his smile matches.

~

**Notes:**

  * Thank you for reading! Please kudos or comment if you enjoyed it
  * If you want to get in touch, please do! You can find me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/little-lottie)




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